Home › Recipes › Baked Chocolate Custard
Baked Chocolate Custard
2 cups milk, 1 inch-piece stick cinnamon, 1 ounce Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon boiling water, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 5 tablespoons sugar.
Scald milk with cinnamon. Melt chocolate; add three tablespoons sugar and boiling water. Stir until smooth; then add to scalded milk. Beat eggs slightly, add remaining sugar and salt. Combine mixtures, and strain into slightly-buttered cups. Set in pan of hot water, and bake in a slow oven until firm, which may be determined by running a silver knife through custard. If knife comes out clean, custard is done.
SNOW PUDDING (Chocolate Sauce) 2 1/2 cups milk, Whites 2 eggs, 1/3 cup cornstarch, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/3 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Mix cornstarch and salt with one-half cup milk. Scald remaining milk; add cornstarch mixture gradually, while stirring constantly, and let cook fifteen minutes. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, and then gradually, while beating constantly, add sugar and vanilla. Add to cooked mixture, and beat vigorously one minute. Turn into a mould, first dipped in cold water; chill, remove from mould, and serve with
A plain baked custard, enriched with unsweetened chocolate and infused with cinnamon. The whole thing turns on gentle heat: a custard that boils will curdle and weep.
- The chocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, sold in cakes scored into ounce squares. Any modern 100% unsweetened baking chocolate is a direct substitute; do not use bittersweet or semi-sweet without cutting the sugar.
- A slow ovenRead that as 300–325F. The water bath plus low heat is what keeps the eggs from scrambling, so resist the urge to hurry it at 375F.
- TimingThe original gives none. Expect 35–50 minutes for individual cups, depending on their depth. Pull the custards when the centers still wobble slightly — carryover heat finishes them, and a knife test done too late means an overcooked edge.
- The silver knifeAny thin blade works. Test just off-center rather than dead center, which sets last.
- ScaldingBring the milk with the cinnamon stick to about 180F, when it steams and shows bubbles at the rim. This both infuses the spice and shortens the bake.
- StrainingNot optional. It catches the cinnamon stick, any chalazae, and any bits of egg that set on contact with the hot chocolate mixture. It is the difference between a smooth custard and a grainy one.
- YieldRoughly four 5-ounce custard cups, or three larger ramekins.
- The second recipeWhat follows the custard is a separate dish — a cornstarch blancmange lightened with meringue, here called Snow Pudding — and the page breaks off mid-sentence before the chocolate sauce it was meant to be served with. Treat the two as unrelated.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate concerns in the United States, and its promotional booklets of Choice Recipes — several of them assembled with contributions from cooking-school figures such as Fannie Farmer and Maria Parloa — were a standard way for a manufacturer to teach households what to do with an ingredient they might otherwise use only for drinking. That is why the brand name is written into the ingredient list: the point of the book was to sell the ounce square. Baked custard itself is far older than the company, a direct descendant of the English and French egg-and-milk custards set in a bain-marie, and the cinnamon stick steeped in the milk is the period's usual gesture toward flavoring before vanilla extract became cheap and universal. The chocolate version reflects a turn-of-the-century American appetite for treating chocolate as a dessert flavoring rather than only a beverage.