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Chocolate Icing
One cupful of chocolate, one-half cup milk, yolk of one egg, one and one-fourth cupfuls of sugar. Let it boil until thick.
A four-ingredient boiled icing of the sort that fills the back pages of turn-of-the-century supper chapters, written for cooks who already knew what "boil until thick" looked like. Almost everything here hangs on how far you take the sugar.
- What "a cupful of chocolate" meansIn this period it most often means unsweetened baking chocolate, grated or shaved from a cake of it, rather than cocoa powder or chips, though some books used sweetened cake chocolate. A packed cup of gratings is perhaps 4 to 5 oz; the original is genuinely imprecise, so start at 4 oz and judge by consistency.
- The hinge: how far to boilThe recipe names no stage; "until thick" probably corresponds to something near the soft-ball range, around 235-240F. Stop short of that and it stays a sauce; go well past and the icing sets hard and grainy. A thermometer takes out guesswork the original leaves in, though the book gives no target.
- Guard the yolkWhisk the yolk into the cold milk before any heat goes near it, and keep the pan moving. Added to a hot chocolate mixture it will scramble into threads that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- Beat as it coolsThe recipe stops at the boil, but boiled icings of this type are beaten off the heat until they thicken and lose their gloss, then spread quickly. Left to cool untouched, the sugar crystallises coarsely.
- SugarOne and one-fourth cupfuls is about 8.5 oz of granulated sugar.
- SpreadingIt sets fast. Have the cake cooled and level on the table before the pan comes off the stove, and spread with a knife dipped in hot water.
Boiled icings like this one belong to the era before electric mixers; a cook made frosting by cooking sugar to a stage and beating it, the same skill used for fudge and for caramels. The egg yolk here is doing the work of both enricher and emulsifier, giving the icing a softer set and a fudgier body than a plain water-and-sugar glaze. Its placement in a supper chapter may hint at what late-Victorian and Edwardian supper is often said to have meant in an American household: not a second dinner but a lighter evening spread of breads, cold dishes and cake, though a single-line recipe can bear only so much of that reading.