Home › Fancy Dishes › Chocolate Custard (Three ounces Baker's chocolate)
Chocolate Custard (Three ounces Baker's chocolate)
Three ounces Baker's chocolate, three pints milk, four tablespoons white sugar, two tablespoons of brown sugar; prepare a soft custard of the milk and the yolks of five eggs, the whites of one; dissolve the chocolate in a cup of warm milk; heat it to a boiling point; when cool sweeten with brown sugar and flavor with the extract of vanilla, pour into a dish, cover with whites of five eggs beaten stiff, with a little sugar; brown slightly; serve cold.
A stirred custard with a meringue cap, written in the compressed style of the period — the ingredient list and the method do not quite agree, so read both before starting.
- The hinge: never let the custard boilA soft custard is done at 170-180F, when it coats a spoon and leaves a clean track. Past about 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of whisking brings it back. Cook it in a double boiler or over low direct heat with constant stirring.
- Baker's chocolateThis is unsweetened baking chocolate, not cocoa powder and not a sweetened eating chocolate, which is why the recipe carries so much added sugar. Modern Baker's comes in one-ounce squares, so three ounces is three squares; in the nineteenth century it was sold in larger cakes.
- The sugar contradictionThe list calls for four tablespoons white and two brown, but the method only mentions sweetening with brown after cooling. Treat the white sugar as part of the custard base and the brown as an adjustment at the end; six tablespoons total for six cups of milk is restrained by modern taste, and you may want more.
- MeasuresThree pints is six cups. Vanilla is left unmeasured — one to two teaspoons, stirred in once the custard is off the heat so the flavor is not driven off.
- The eggsFive yolks plus one white thicken the custard, and the topping calls for the whites of five eggs — but only four whites are left over, so a sixth egg is needed unless you scale the meringue down. Beat the whites to stiff peaks with two to three tablespoons of sugar so the topping holds rather than weeping.
- "Brown slightly"The recipe gives no oven and no temperature, only the instruction to brown slightly. A short spell in a hot oven, or under a broiler watched constantly, will color the meringue; keep it brief, since the dish is served cold and prolonged heat will overcook the custard beneath.
- Chilling and yieldServe cold, as directed — the custard sets only lightly and is loose while warm. Six cups of milk makes a generous dish for eight.
Baker's chocolate takes its name from Dr. James Baker, who backed John Hannon's chocolate mill on the Neponset River in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1765; by the time this book was compiled the brand was well established in American kitchens. The dish itself is a soft or "boiled" custard — the everyday stovetop custard of the nineteenth century — dressed up with chocolate and a meringue lid, a treatment shared with floating island and queen of puddings. The split use of white and brown sugar is characteristic of the period, when brown sugar was cheaper, darker and more strongly flavored than today's product.