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Chocolate Cream Renverse
1 quart milk, 1 ounce Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium 1 cup sugar, 5 eggs, 1/2 teaspoon salt. No. 1 Chocolate, Caramelize one-third cup sugar, turn into a hot charlotte russe mould, and turn the mould around and around until coated with the caramel. Scaled milk with chocolate. Beat eggs slightly; add remaining sugar and salt. Pour milk slowly onto egg mixture, and strain into mould. Set in pan of hot water and bake in a slow oven until firm. Chill thoroughly, remove from mould, and serve with whipped cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla.
A baked chocolate custard turned out of a caramel-lined mould — what a French kitchen would call a crème renversée. The recipe is sound; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- The hinge: low heat, water bath, and stop earlyCustard sets around 170-175F and curdles not far above it. Bake at 300-325F in the water bath until the outer inch is set and the center still trembles when the mould is nudged; it firms as it chills. A "slow oven" here is not a suggestion.
- "Scaled milk" is scalded milkA typesetting slip. Heat the quart of milk with the chopped chocolate until steam rises and bubbles ring the edge, whisking to disperse the chocolate, then pour it slowly onto the eggs while stirring so they temper rather than scramble.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate — the ancestor of today's baking chocolate. One ounce to a quart of milk gives a pale, barely-chocolate custard by modern taste; the sweetening all comes from the cup of sugar.
- The charlotte russe mouldA straight-sided tin mould; sizes varied. A 2-quart metal or ceramic mould, or a plain round cake pan, works; metal releases more reliably than glass.
- Caramelizing the third-cup of sugarMelt it dry in a heavy pan until deep amber, then pour into the mould, which should be warm so the caramel stays fluid long enough to coat. Molten sugar runs well above 300F — work with a dry pan, a dry mould, and no children underfoot.
- Straining is not optionalThe strainer catches chalazae, any bits of egg that seized during tempering, and undissolved chocolate. Skip it and the unmoulded custard shows specks and pinholes.
- UnmouldingChill at least four hours, preferably overnight. Run a thin knife around the rim, dip the base in hot water for ten seconds, invert onto a rimmed dish — the caramel has become a thin sauce and will run.
- YieldA quart of milk and five eggs serves eight generously.
Renvers urover" \--" — the custard is baked in its caramel-lined mould and inverted for serving, the same construction the Spanish call flan. This version comes from one of the recipe booklets Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts distributed to promote its chocolate, a genre of advertising cookery that flourished from the 1880s onward and often drew on the Boston Cooking School idiom; the phrasing here, with its tempered custard and precise mould, has that school's fingerprints. Baker's had been grinding cacao on the Neponset River since the late eighteenth century, and by the time this pamphlet appeared its unsweetened cakes were a pantry staple — which is why so many of these recipes read less like chocolate desserts than like standard dishes with an ounce of chocolate folded in.