Fudge Sauce
2 Squares (ounces) Chocolate 2 Cupfuls Sugar 1 1/2 Cupfuls Milk 2 Tablespoonfuls Flour 2 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 1 Teaspoonful Vanilla ⅛ Teaspoonful Salt Melt the Snowdrift in a sauce-pan, stir in the flour and salt, and gradually add half the milk, stirring constantly, as in making a white sauce. Melt the chocolate, add the sugar, then the remaining milk, stir well and cook together until syrupy.
Then combine the two mixtures and simmer for about five minutes, or until quite thick. Add the vanilla and serve hot with Bread-Rice-Cereal or Cottage Pudding, with Ice Cream, with Snow Puffs, Chocolate Puffs or Sponge Cake; or serve cold with Ice Cream, Cornstarch or Moulded Tapioca Pudding, with Cake Pudding, Bread Pudding or Baked Custard.
The ingredient list as printed has been mangled — the milk and chocolate are called for in the method but never quantified, and the sugar has drifted to the end of the list. What follows is a flour-thickened chocolate sauce, closer to a sweet béchamel than to modern fudge sauce.
- Missing quantitiesThe method requires milk and chocolate that the list omits entirely. Any figure is guesswork: 2 tablespoonfuls each of flour and fat is a conventional proportion for roughly 1 to 2 cupfuls of milk, and a couple of ounces of unsweetened chocolate would suit 1 cupful of sugar. Treat that as a reconstruction rather than the book's own figures.
- "18 Teaspoonful"Almost certainly 1/8 teaspoonful of salt, the fraction having lost its slash somewhere between setting and transcription.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and the reason this booklet exists. Unsalted butter is the sensible substitute in a dessert sauce; any neutral solid shortening also works if you want the original texture.
- Chocolate"The chocolate" means unsweetened baking chocolate, not chips or cocoa. Chips carry their own sugar and emulsifiers and will make the sauce cloying against a full cup of sugar.
- The hingeCook the flour, fat and salt together for a minute before any milk goes in, then add the milk in stages while stirring. A raw-flour taste is the usual failure here, and it does not cook out later once the sugar is in.
- SimmeringFive minutes at a bare simmer is right; a hard boil after the two mixtures are combined will scorch the milk solids on the pan bottom and thin the flour's thickening power.
- Vanilla lastThe recipe adds it at the end, though it does not say off the heat; taking the pan off the heat first is advisable, as extract added to a simmering sauce loses much of its aroma.
- Yield and behaviourNo yield is given; it will depend on how much milk you settle on. It thickens considerably as it cools and may set almost to a pudding in the refrigerator; thin it with a spoonful of milk over low heat before serving cold over ice cream.
A New Snowdrift Cook Book belongs to the great wave of American manufacturer cookbooks, published to show housewives that a tin of vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard in everything from pie crust to dessert sauce — hence the insistence on Snowdrift in a recipe where the fat contributes little but gloss. The sauce itself is a period type: a chocolate sauce built on a flour roux, exactly as a white sauce was built for creamed vegetables, and simply sweetened — an approach later largely displaced by bases of evaporated milk and corn syrup. The long list of suggested partners — cottage pudding, snow puffs, moulded tapioca, baked custard — gives some idea of the plain, starchy desserts such a sauce was meant to accompany.