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Chocolate Pudding
One quart sweet milk, three ounces grated chocolate, one cup sugar, yolks of five eggs; scald milk and chocolate together, and, when cool, add sugar and eggs, and bake. When done, put beaten whites and five table-spoons sugar on top, and set in oven to brown. Or, boil one pint milk, add half cup butter, one of sugar, and three ounces grated chocolate; pour this over two slices of bread soaked in water; when cool, add the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, bake, and when done, spread over the whites beaten with sugar, and brown in oven. Serve hot or cold. - Miss Greeley Grubbs, Richmond, Indiana.
Two versions of the same idea: a baked chocolate custard finished with a meringue. The first is a plain custard, the second a bread pudding. Neither gives a temperature or a time, which is where most of the work lies.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyThis is a custard, not a cake. Bake at 325F in a water bath until the center is just set and jiggles as one mass, roughly 45 to 60 minutes for the quart version in a 2-quart dish. Higher heat curdles the eggs and weeps liquid under the meringue.
- "Grated chocolate"In this period the term usually meant unsweetened cake chocolate, close to modern unsweetened baking chocolate. Three ounces of that with one cup sugar gives a firmly bitter pudding; if you substitute semisweet, cut the sugar by about a third.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk also kept in the house. Whole milk is the right choice; skim makes a thin custard.
- "When cool"Let the scalded milk drop until it is warm rather than hot before adding the yolks, and add it to them in a slow stream while whisking. Straining the mixture afterward removes any threads of cooked egg.
- The meringueBeat the whites to soft peaks, add the five tablespoons sugar gradually, and spread it so it touches the dish rim all around, which keeps it from shrinking. Brown at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, watching it.
- Second version, bread and butterTwo slices soaked in water is an imprecise measure; two thick slices of stale white bread, squeezed nearly dry, suits a pint of milk. Half a cup of butter is generous by modern taste and can be halved with little loss beyond richness.
- YieldThe quart version serves six to eight; the pint bread version four to six. Meringue-topped custards do not keep well past the day they are made.
Baked custards crowned with a sweetened meringue were a familiar dessert format in the American mid-century kitchen, and this page shows chocolate being folded into that familiar mold rather than treated as anything novel. Drinking chocolate had been common in the United States for a century, but by the 1870s grated cake chocolate from firms such as Baker's was cheap and reliable enough to turn up in ordinary puddings. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio and published in 1877, gathered its contents by name and town from women across the Midwest, which is why this entry carries Miss Greeley Grubbs of Richmond, Indiana, at the end. The second version, stretching a pint of milk with soaked bread, is the thrifty variant, and the pairing of the two on one page is a fair picture of how such books worked: a household could pick according to what was in the larder.