From: The Lady Cravens Receipt-Booke
Contributor: Marissa Nicosia, Penn State Abington
Recipe
To Make Chocolett Cream
Take a pint of cream, one spoonful of chocolet, & the yolks of 2 Eggs & the
white of one, then sweeten it to your taste, let it boyle up, & then put
it into a Chocolet pot, & mill it, & then serve it up when it is cold
Notes for a Modern Kitchen
1 pint (473ml) heavy cream
1 oz. (25g) baking chocolate
2 eggs
¼ cup sugar (50g)
Chop your chocolate into small pieces that will easily dissolve in hot cream.
Separate one egg and set aside one egg white. Whisk one whole egg and one yolk together in a small bowl.
Pour the cream into a small saucepan. Add the sugar, chopped chocolate, and whisked eggs to the pot. Heat over a medium heat until just simmering – about five minutes. Pay close attention to the pot to avoid overcooking and stir to prevent the eggs from solidifying on the bottom of the pot.
Remove the pot from the stove and pour the chocolate cream mixture into a sturdy bowl (or the bowl of a standing mixer). Beat with an electric mixer (or in a standing mixer, or by whisking vigorously) for about two minutes. (It will take substantially longer if you are doing this by hand.) The chocolate will fully integrate into the mix, small bubbles will form, and it will begin to look glossy.
Rinse out your saucepan and pour the chocolate cream mix back into the pot. Cook over a low heat for approximately ten minutes, whisking constantly. The cream will thicken and reduce in volume during this step.
Pour the hot chocolate cream mix into a storage container or heat-safe serving dish and allow to cool first at room temperature and then in the refrigerator for at least two hours.
Serve the chocolate cream cold. Fresh fruit, a fruit sauce, or simple cookies or biscuits would compliment its rich chocolate flavor.
Background
Elizabeth Craven (Lady Craven) began to compile this recipe book in 1702 in the early years of her marriage and was still adding recipes to its pages at the time of her death in 1704, at age 25. Chocolate was a new and fashionable ingredient in England that had recently arrived from the Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Recipes for chocolate drinks and creams from this period reveal how Indigenous American knowledge about chocolate and the culinary preferences of Spanish colonizers shaped early uses of chocolate in English cookery.