Dreaming
Of A White Christmas
The sweet known
as “White Christmas” is an Australian specialty, a kind of white fudge. Like many
home-made sweets, it’s made in a solid slab and then cut up into pieces.
The base ingredient is a vegetable fat
which remains solid and stable at room temperature: either the hydrogenated coconut
oil “copha” (the Australian term; in New Zealand it’s Kremelta), or white chocolate,
which is sweetened cocoa butter (theobroma oil) from the cocoa bean.
To
this base the usual additions are glacé cherries, and any of a range of
secondary ingredients such as other dried or crystallised fruits, rice bubbles
(a favourite), desiccated coconut, nuts, a sweetener, and often a dairy option
such as milk powder or even cream.
Healthy? No.
Before we
look at the recipes, let’s get our facts straight. You didn’t think that sweets
were gonna be good for you in any case, didja? No. However, given the current
food fads, especially the fervent advocacy of coconut products, let’s find out exactly
what we’re talking about, here. “White Christmas” may be based on copha or on
white chocolate—but claims that one is healthier for you than the other are
spurious. White chocolate does have less saturated fat than copha, but both are
very high in saturated fat. And copha is something that should be eaten infrequently
in very small quantities: not used as a base for anything you bake regularly.
You’ll quite often see it in slice recipes. Avoid it.
*** Copha
Copha, as it’s
called in Australia (“Kremelta” in New Zealand) is hydrogenated (solidified) coconut
oil. You can find out all about coconut oil from Wikipedia’s excellent article “Coconut
Oil” and believe you me, after reading it you won't ever believe it's healthy
again. Here’s what it says on the process of turning the oil into a solid:
Hydrogenation
RBD [refined, bleached, and deodorized] coconut oil can
be processed further into partially or fully hydrogenated oil to increase its
melting point. …
In the process
of hydrogenation, unsaturated fats (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty
acids) are combined with hydrogen in a catalytic process to make them more
saturated. Coconut oil contains only 6% monounsaturated and 2% polyunsaturated
fatty acids. In the partial hydrogenation process, some of these are
transformed into trans fatty acids.
“More saturated.”
Ouch. What this means is, the coconut oil product (copha) gets worse.
*** White Chocolate
“White
chocolate is a chocolate derivative. It commonly consists of cocoa butter,
sugar and milk solids and is characterized by a pale yellow or ivory
appearance.” (“White chocolate”, Wikipedia). Cocoa butter is the vegetable fat
extracted from cocoa beans. Wikipedia’s article on it tells us: “It contains a
high proportion of saturated fats as well as monounsaturated oleic acid.” (“Cocoa
Butter”, Wikipedia).
*** Let’s
compare fat facts
The list
below, compiled from the two Wikipedia articles mentioned above, shows you the
comparative fat content of coconut oil, cocoa butter, and a couple of popular
cooking oils. The percentages are of the weight of total fats (fatty acids) in
each.
Coconut Oil:
82.5% Saturated
6.3% Monounsaturated
1.7% Polyunsaturated:
Cocoa Butter:
57 - 64% Saturated
29 - 43% Monounsaturated
0 - 5% Polyunsaturated
Canola Oil:
7.4% Saturated
63.3% Monounsaturated
28.1% Polyunsaturated
Olive Oil:
13.8% Saturated
73% Monounsaturated
10.5% Polyunsaturated
If the unhydrogenated
coconut oil is 82.5 percent saturated fats, the hydrogenated copha is going to
be even higher. Oh, dear. Because white chocolate is a commercial product it’s impossible
to tell exactly how much saturated fat each version contains, but since it’s
mainly cocoa butter, it’s a very high proportion. Not as high as copha, no, but
it’s not gonna be healthy!
But gee, who gorges on fat-laden foods at Christmas,
anyway?
The Forerunners
Such easy-to-make
recipes as “White Christmas” and its cousin “Rocky Road” have replaced the earlier
home-made sweets created as slabs to be cut up, such as nougat, which were much
harder to make. This 1959 recipe from The
Australian Women’s Weekly is typical, entailing a lot of hard beating:
Cherry Nougat
One and a half pounds sugar, 1/2 lb liquid
glucose, 6 tablespoons water, 1 egg-white, 4 oz glace cherries, 2oz chopped
blanched almonds or walnuts, l teaspoon vanilla, 1 teaspoon lemon juice.
Place sugar and glucose into saucepan, add
water, stir with wooden spoon over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Boil
steadily to 240deg. F. Pour into basin. When cool but not cold, beat for 3
minutes, then fold in stiffly beaten egg-white, cherries, nuts, vanilla, and
lemon juice. Continue beating until white and stiff. Press into greased
bar-tin. When set, cut into blocks.
(The
Australian Women's Weekly, Wednesday 2 December 1959)
In this combination we see the old-fashioned
version of the Christmassy combination of red glacé cherries and a white base
which now typifies “White Christmas.”
Later, in 1980, Mrs L. Pescott had another
version of this nougat, in her Early
Settlers Household Lore, a large collection of what she claimed were old traditional
Australian recipes. A lot of them clearly have nothing to do with early settlers,
they were just her friends’ and relations’ favourites of the moment. But some of
them are old recipes, and the ones in her section on “Sweetmeats” look pretty genuine.
Most of them entail a lot of hard work—not to mention knowing the tricks to
make the thing turn out right! “Twisted Hair”, for instance, is a recipe for
pulled toffee (often “pulled taffy” in the older American books), which would have
been over a hundred years old. Likewise “The Vicar’s Barley Sugar”, shaped into
twists in the old way that most of us would never have heard of in 1980. And “Marzipan”
is very old, far predating most of the others.
Cherry and Nut Nougat
1 oz. halved glace cherries; 1 oz. chopped walnuts;
6 ozs. granulated sugar; 1/2 gill water (1/4 pint);
1 level teaspoon honey; 1 egg white;
a few drops of lemon juice; a sheet of rice paper
A tin six inches square will be required.
Line the tin with half the rice paper.
Dissolve the sugar in the water in a medium sized pan over gentle heat. Make sure
every grain of sugar is dissolved before the mixture comes to the boil. Add the
honey.
Bring the mixture to the boil and boil it continuously,
without stirring, for 3 or 4 minutes until the syrup seems thicker.
To test for the right consistency, drop a
little of the syrup into a cup of cold water and when it is ready it should roll
into a firm ball between the fingers. As soon as this stage is reached, take
the pan off the heat
Quickly whip the egg white stiffly then beat
the syrup into the egg white. Stir in the lemon juice, cherries and nuts and
pout the nougat into the lined tin.
Cover the nougat with the rest of the rice paper.
Leave the nougat overnight or until it is absolutely cold. Cut the nougat into
rectangles.
(L. Pescott. Early Settlers' Household Lore. Rev. ed., Richmond, Vic., Raphael
Arts, 1980)
Dreaming of
that White Christmas
“White Christmas”
itself can’t date back earlier than the nineteen-thirties, because its base
ingredient, copha (hydrogenated coconut oil), was introduced in Australia in 1933.
(See more in “Snap, Crackle— Slice? The Australasian ‘Slice’ (2)”)
Later, versions of the sweet appeared using
white chocolate.
There is a recipe in the new edition of The Golden Wattle Cookery Book (Thirty
sixth impression, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1999, reprinted 2005), but this
book has been added to over the years since it was first published in 1926, so
there’s no telling when each recipe was written.
Irving Berlin’s song White Christmas as sung by Bing Crosby was well known years before the
famous movie came out in 1954, as I mentioned in the “Snap, Crackle, Slice” blog
article. But the recipe? Well, in 1948 it wasn’t a recipe, it was a bathing
suit:
Presumably the sweet took its name from the
song: when the film came out it became even more popular than it had originally
been.
The sweet considerably post-dates the movie.
The first published version of the recipe I could find under the now traditional
name, “White Christmas,” is in The
Australian Women’s Weekly of 15 November 1978; two years earlier, however,
we can discern its culinary roots in the same magazine’s “Ripe Cherry Slice” of
8 December 1976:
Ripe Cherry Slice
250g (8 oz) dark chocolate; 1 1/2 cups coconut;
30g (1 oz) solid white vegetable shortening [copha/Kremelta];
1/4 cup ground almonds; 1/2 cup icing sugar; 2 egg whites;
2 tablespoons rum; 125g (4 oz) glace cherries
Melt chopped chocolate and vegetable shortening
in top of double saucepan over simmering water.
Line two 25cm x 8cm (10in x 3in) bar tins
with aluminium foil, pour half chocolate mixture evenly over base of ach tin
(reserve remaining chocolate for top); refrigerate until set.
In bowl combine coconut, ground almonds and
sifted icing sugar. Add unbeaten egg whites and rum, mix well; chop cherries
roughly, add to coconut mixture, mix well.
Spread mixture evenly over chocolate in both
tins, pour remaining chocolate mixture evenly over coconut mixture, refrigerate
until set.
Before serving, allow to stand at room temperature
for 30 minutes, to soften chocolate so that it cuts well; remove from tins,
carefully peel off aluminium foil, cut into slices.
(The
Australian Women’s Weekly, 8 December 1976)
“Vegetable shortening”
in such recipes always means copha (in Australia) or Kremelta (in New Zealand).
Here’s
the 1978 recipe for “White Christmas”:
White Christmas Slice
250g (8oz) solid white vegetable shortening [copha/Kremelta];
2 1/2 cups coconut; 1 1/4 cups icing sugar;
1 1/4 cups full cream milk powder; 250g (8oz) glace cherries;
60g (20z) dark chocolate
Melt chopped vegetable shortening over low
heat.
Combine in bowl coconut, sifted icing sugar
and powdered milk. Add melted vegetable shortening, mix well.
Spread one third of the mixture over base of
18cm x 28 cm (7in x 11in) lamington tin which has been lined with aluminium
foil. Refrigerate until base is nearly set.
Chop cherries roughly, sprinkle over base,
press lightly into base. Spread remaining coconut mixture evenly over cherries,
refrigerate until set.
Put chocolate in top of double saucepan over simmering
water until melted, remove from heat, cool slightly, then spread evenly over
top of slice; refrigerate until set.
Cut int slices to serve: for easier cutting,
remove slice from refrigerator 30 minutes before cutting.
(The
Australian Women’s Weekly, 15 November 1978)
These two recipes date from the period when
home cooks began to make easy sweets in slab-like form, intended to be cut up
into pieces: these were often called a “slice”. Today, recipes called “slice”
are rarely for sweets. The modern terminology “slice” is nearly always used for
a flat cake-like substance, baked or unbaked, intended to be eaten as a dessert
or for morning and afternoon tea. I’ve tried to trace its history in two earlier
blog articles: “Condensed Cholesterol & Sugar Blindness:
the Australasian ‘Slice’ (1)” and “Snap, Crackle— Slice? The Australasian ‘Slice’ (2)”.
The modern
take? Drop the glacé cherries
White Christmas
600g
white chocolate, chopped;
1
cup (160g) blanched almonds, roasted;
1/2
cup (75g) dried apricots, chopped;
1
1/2 cups (150g) walnuts; 1 teaspoon
ground ginger
Place
the chocolate in a heatproof bowl placed over a saucepan of simmering water and
stir until melted and smooth. Stir in the almonds, apricot, walnuts and ginger.
Pour
into a 26cm x 16cm tin lined with non-stick baking paper and smooth top with
the back of a spoon.
Refrigerate
for 1 hour or until set. Turn out and cut into long slices.
–Makes 20.
(Donna Hay Magazine. Issue 42 (Dec
2008-Jan 2009))
You can see that it uses white chocolate,
not copha: white chocolate is a much
more up-market ingredient!
A few
years later in Bite website The New
Zealand Woman’s Weekly reprises this mixture but adds rice bubbles and mini
marshmallows, popping the result into paper cases, cupcake-fashion (cupcakes being
very In with the middle-class Antipodean housewives, this decade):
White Christmas
Clusters
180g
white chocolate; 1/4 cup cream;
1 1/2
cups rice bubbles; 1 1/2 cups marshmallows [mini];
75g dried
apricots
1.
Place chopped chocolate and cream in a heat-proof bowl and melt over a saucepan
of simmering water or melt in a microwave.
2.
Stir in the rice bubbles, marshmallows and well- chopped apricots. (use mini
marshmallows or cut large ones).
3.
Spoon mixture into mini paper cases and leave to set. Store in an airtight
container. Serve festooned with ribbon.
—By NZ Woman's Weekly. (Bite, circa 2018) http://www.bite.co.nz
Back to the dream?
The same magazine, at around the same time
in the same website, also gives the now traditional version with the glacé
cherries—except that it adds currants. An odd touch; was it supposed to make it
original?
White Christmas
2 1/2 cups rice bubbles; 1 cup coconut;
3/4 cup icing sugar; 1 cup milk powder
1 cup glace cherries; 1/2 cup currants
250g vegetable shortening [Kremelta/copha]
1.
Combine all ingredients except vegetable shortening.
2.
Melt vegetable shortening over a low heat and stir into the dry ingredients.
Press mixture into a baking-paper-lined 20cm square slice pan.
3.
Refrigerate until set and then cut into squares.
—By NZ Women’s Weekly. (Bite, circa 2018) http://www.bite.co.nz
Still dreaming
The sweet “White
Christmas” has become such a cultural icon in Australia that collections of its
variants are now being published: try the BestRecipes feature for Christmas 2018,
“11
White Christmas treats to enjoy with a cuppa.” The website notes: “You’ll
be dreaming of a winter wonderland with these sweet treats.”
If you
like peppermint, their “White Christmas
Peppermint Surprise” looks intriguing!
Wishing you
all a very Merry Christmas 2018, and the happiest of new years.
No comments:
Post a Comment