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Chocolate Custard
Pour half a cupful of boiling water over one ounce of the best chocolate finely grated, let it stand by the fire till it is dissolved; stir it gradually into a pint of milk or cream, and add two table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar and the yolks of four eggs well beaten. Put the custard into a saucepan, and beat it to a froth until it thickens. It may be put into cups and baked in a good oven. It is more generally served as it is. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d., if made with milk. Sufficient for a pint and a half.
A stirred pouring custard rather than a baked one, and the whole thing turns on temperature control. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: never let it boilFour yolks in a pint of liquid set at roughly 175-180F. Hold the pan over gentle heat, stir constantly, and pull it the moment it coats the back of a spoon; a simmer will scramble the yolks and no amount of beating will bring it back. A heatproof bowl over barely simmering water is more forgiving than direct heat.
- "The best chocolate"In a Victorian kitchen this generally meant a hard plain cake of chocolate sold in blocks for grating, though such cakes were often lightly sweetened rather than pure cocoa mass. Use unsweetened chocolate or a very high-percentage bar; a modern dark eating chocolate at 70% brings its own sugar and will make the custard sweeter than a plain cake would.
- Sifted sugarSugar passed through a sieve; in period usage this could be anything from caster-fine to a powdered sugar. Two tablespoons for a pint is restrained by current taste, especially with unsweetened chocolate; increase if you want it sweeter.
- MeasuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups of milk or cream. Victorian "cupful" measures were not standardised, so treat the half cupful of boiling water as approximate. "Sufficient for a pint and a half" is the finished volume, about 3 3/4 US cups, which serves four to six in small cups.
- Dissolving the chocolateGrate it fine, pour the boiling water over, and leave it somewhere warm until smooth. Chocolate seizes if it meets too little liquid or too much heat, so whisk the paste until glossy before it goes anywhere near the milk.
- If you bake it"A good oven" is imprecise; for a baked custard read it as a moderate oven, somewhere in the region of 325-350F. Set the filled cups in a roasting tin of hot water and bake until just barely set with a slight wobble at the centre, 25-35 minutes depending on cup size. Strain the custard first to catch any bits of cooked egg.
- "Beat it to a froth"This gives the served-as-it-is version its character; the recipe prefers it unbaked, taken warm and foamy rather than chilled to a firm set. If you want the froth, whisk hard in the pan; if you want a smooth sauce, stir with a spatula instead.
- Time and costThe half hour appears to cover dissolving, stirring and thickening rather than any baking. Eightpence for a pint and a half of milk custard was a modest outlay.
For most of the nineteenth century chocolate was a drink rather than a dessert ingredient in British kitchens, sold as a hard cake to be grated and dissolved, which is exactly what happens here. The instruction to beat it to a froth and serve it as it is, rather than baking it, echoes that drinking-chocolate ancestry; froth was the mark of well-made chocolate, raised with a wooden mill. Van Houten's Dutch process for alkalised cocoa powder, patented in the Netherlands in the 1820s, was spreading through the British market by the time this book appeared, and grating a block would soon look old-fashioned. Recording a probable cost in pence was standard practice in Cassell's, aimed at a mistress of the house checking whether the kitchen accounts made sense.