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Chocolate Custard
One-fourth pound chocolate, one quart milk, four eggs, one cup sugar, one heaping teaspoonful of corn starch, when the milk boils add the corn starch, sugar and eggs, reserving the whites of two eggs for frosting, when it thickens a little, take it up, strain it in small glass dishes, beat up the whites of eggs with a little granulated sugar and drop a small tablespoonful on each custard; flavor with vanilla. Use a farina kettle.
A stirred stovetop custard thickened with both egg and a little cornstarch, portioned into glasses and capped with raw meringue. The hinge is heat control: the mixture must thicken below a simmer or it will scramble, which is exactly why the original specifies a farina kettle.
- Farina kettleA farina kettle is a double boiler — an inner pan set over water in an outer one. Use a heatproof bowl or saucepan over barely simmering water; direct heat will curdle the eggs before the starch has done its work.
- The chocolateQuarter pound is 4 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard cake-and-custard chocolate of the period, not modern eating chocolate. Chop it and melt it into the milk as the milk heats. If you substitute semisweet or bittersweet, cut the cup of sugar back by about a third.
- Adding the eggsDo not tip the beaten eggs, sugar and cornstarch straight into boiling milk. Whisk a ladleful of the hot chocolate milk into the egg mixture first, then return everything to the pan over the water bath, stirring constantly.
- "When it thickens a little"Expect several minutes of steady stirring, perhaps ten to fifteen depending on the pan and the heat, until the custard coats a spoon; around 175-180F is the usual guide. It will be pourable, not set — this is a soft custard, closer to a thick drinking chocolate than a baked pot de creme, and it firms up when chilled.
- StrainingStrain while hot, as directed; it catches any bits of set egg and the odd fleck of undissolved starch. Flavour with vanilla after the pan comes off the heat, an extract teaspoon or two, so the aroma is not driven off.
- The frostingThe two reserved whites are beaten with sugar and spooned on raw, as the original directs. Raw egg white carries a small salmonella risk today; use pasteurized whites, or set the topped glasses under a hot broiler for under a minute to brown and firm the meringue.
- YieldA quart of milk with four eggs should fill six to eight small glass dishes. The recipe gives no serving temperature, but a strained soft custard in glasses is normally left to cool and served chilled; two hours in the refrigerator will do.
Chocolate custard belongs to the moment when chocolate stopped being chiefly a drink and became a flavouring for the dessert course. American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century assumed a household would keep a cake or two of hard unsweetened chocolate on hand — Baker's was the best-known American brand — to be grated or chopped into milk. So does the equipment: the farina kettle took its name from the wheat cereal it was sold to cook, and it earned its place in the kitchen precisely because delicate milk-and-egg mixtures like this one could be brought to the thickening point over water without scorching. The custard is served in small glass dishes rather than one large mould, letting the dark custard and white meringue be seen through the sides.