Home › Creams and Custards › Chocolate Custard
Chocolate Custard
Break two sections chocolate in a half-dozen pieces, put it in a pan over boiling water, with milk enough to barely cover it; mash and stir perfectly smooth, then add the rest of the milk (one quart in all, reserving three table-spoons in which to dissolve the corn starch,) one cup sugar, yolks of six eggs, a heaping table-spoon corn starch; beat the yolks, add the sugar and corn starch (dissolved in milk), stir all slowly in the boiling milk, in which the chocolate is: dissolved, add a pinch of salt, and let cook a few minutes, stirring constantly; eat cold with white cake. - Miss Burnie Johnson.
A stovetop chocolate custard thickened with both egg yolks and cornstarch, so it sets firm enough to spoon. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat and constant stirring.
- "Two sections chocolate"A section is a piece broken from a cake of baking chocolate, commonly reckoned at about 1 oz, though cake sizes varied, so roughly 2 oz in total. Baking chocolate of this period was unsweetened, as modern unsweetened baking bars are. If you substitute bittersweet, cut the sugar back.
- Double boiler"A pan over boiling water" is a double boiler, and it is the safeguard here. Direct heat will scramble six yolks before the cornstarch has a chance to thicken.
- ProportionsOne quart milk in all, three tablespoons of it held back to slake the cornstarch; one cup sugar; six yolks; a heaping tablespoon cornstarch, call it a rounded 1 1/2 tablespoons. A pinch of salt is not optional -- it is what makes the chocolate read as chocolate.
- TemperingThe instruction to "stir all slowly in the boiling milk" is the risky moment. Ladle a cup of the hot chocolate milk into the yolk mixture first, whisking, then return the lot to the pan.
- "Let cook a few minutes"Cook until it coats a spoon and the floury taste of the starch is gone, perhaps 5 minutes at a bare simmer over the water bath. Cornstarch needs to approach boiling to thicken fully; the starch gives the yolks some protection, but plain yolks begin to set around 180F, so keep it moving and pull it once it thickens.
- Straining and chillingPass it through a sieve into a bowl, press plastic film onto the surface to stop a skin, and chill at least 4 hours. It firms considerably as it cools.
- YieldAbout 5 cups, serving six to eight in cups or small glasses. The six leftover whites could go toward the white cake the recipe tells you to serve alongside.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, published in Minneapolis and drawing on contributed receipts from Ohio and elsewhere) comes from a period when chocolate was increasingly used as a dessert flavour in American homes rather than chiefly as a drink. Baker's and its competitors sold hard unsweetened chocolate in cakes, which is why the recipe counts sections rather than ounces -- the cook was expected to know the size of the block on her shelf. The doubled thickener, yolks plus cornstarch, suits the period: commercial cornstarch had been manufactured in the United States since the 1840s. Serving it cold with white cake makes economical sense in a household kitchen, since white cake is made with whites. The attribution to Miss Burnie Johnson is typical of the book, which credits many contributors by name.