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Chocolate Pudding
Put an ounce of best chocolate grated, and as much powdered cinnamon as would stand on a threepenny piece into two table-spoonfuls of boiling water. Let the mixture stand by the side of the fire until dissolved, then mix with it a pint of boiling milk, and add four large lumps of sugar, and when it is cold, four eggs well beaten. Pour the mixture into a buttered piedish, and either steam or bake it for half an hour. It is more suitable to eat hot when steamed, and cold when baked. A little sifted sugar may be eaten with the pudding cold, and arrowroot sauce served with it hot. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain baked or steamed custard flavoured with chocolate and cinnamon. The whole thing hangs on temperature: the eggs must go into milk that has genuinely cooled, and the pudding must never boil.
- Let the milk cool properlyThe instruction "when it is cold" is the hinge of the recipe. Beaten eggs stirred into hot chocolate milk will scramble into threads that no amount of baking will smooth out. Cool to lukewarm at most, and strain the mixture through a sieve into the dish.
- The chocolate"Best chocolate" in Victorian usage generally means a hard block of plain eating or cooking chocolate, sweetened to varying degrees and sometimes already flavoured with vanilla or spice. One ounce is about 30 g; a good dark chocolate around 60-70% cocoa is the nearest equivalent. Cocoa powder is not a substitute here, as it will not carry the same fat and body.
- As much as would stand on a threepenny pieceThe silver threepence was a small coin, a little over half an inch across. The measure amounts to a generous pinch of ground cinnamon, roughly a quarter teaspoon.
- Four large lumps of sugarLoaf sugar was broken into lumps considerably bigger than a modern sugar cube. Reckon on about an ounce in total, or two tablespoons. Taste the warm milk and adjust, as the chocolate you use may already be sweetened.
- A pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, or 570 ml, not the 16 fl oz US pint.
- Oven and water bathThe recipe gives no temperature; a modern oven of 325-350F suits a custard of this kind. Standing the pie dish in a roasting tin of hot water protects the edges from setting hard before the centre has caught up. Half an hour is right for a shallow dish; the custard is done when the centre still trembles and a knife near the edge comes out clean.
- SteamingCover the dish with buttered paper or foil and steam over water kept at a bare shiver, not a rolling boil. A hard boil drives the custard past setting into curdling, and the pudding weeps liquid when cut.
- Arrowroot sauceA period arrowroot sauce is arrowroot slaked in cold milk or water, stirred into sweetened hot milk and cooked just until it clears. Arrowroot thins if boiled hard or held too long, so make it at the last moment.
- YieldFour to five small servings, as stated. The eightpence is the cost of ingredients at the time of publication.
Chocolate reached the English kitchen as a drink long before it became a pudding, and this recipe still carries the marks of that: grated block chocolate dissolved in boiling water, spiced with cinnamon, then let down with milk. The chocolate-and-cinnamon pairing is generally traced to Spanish and Mexican drinking chocolate, which was habitually spiced, and it survived in British cookery well into the nineteenth century even as the drink itself grew plainer. It belongs to a family of cheap, egg-thickened puddings that stretched a pint of milk across five people; the note of probable cost, eightpence, is characteristic of a book addressed to households keeping a close eye on the weekly bill.