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Chocolate Filling
1 cup of milk, Pinch of salt, 1 1/2 squares Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 2 level teaspoonfuls of flour, 2 eggs (yolks), 5 tablespoonfuls of sugar (level), 1 teaspoonful of vanilla.
Put milk, salt and chocolate in upper part of the double-boiler, and when hot and smooth, stir in the flour, which has been mixed with enough cold milk to be thin enough to pour into the hot milk. Cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens; then let it cook eight or ten minutes. Mix the eggs and sugar together and pour the hot mixture over them, stirring well; put back in double-boiler and cook, stirring constantly, one minute. Remove, and when cool add one teaspoonful of vanilla.
A flour-thickened chocolate pastry cream, meant for filling a layer cake or a pie shell. It behaves exactly like a modern crème pâtissière, and the same rules apply.
- The chocolateBaker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened chocolate sold in one-ounce squares, so 1 1/2 squares is 1 1/2 oz. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, not semisweet, or the filling will be cloying — the five tablespoons of sugar are the whole sweetening.
- Level measuresThe recipe specifies level teaspoons and tablespoons, worth saying at a period when spoon measures were not yet standardised. Five level tablespoons of sugar is a scant 1/3 cup; two level teaspoons of flour is a small amount of thickener, so the finished cream sets soft rather than sliceable.
- The hinge: temper, then cook brieflyPouring the hot chocolate mixture over the yolk-and-sugar mixture is what keeps the yolks from scrambling. Return it to the double boiler and stir without stopping; one minute is enough to thicken and set the yolks, and longer risks curdling even over water.
- Why a double boilerChocolate and milk scorch readily over direct heat and the flour catches on the bottom. A heatproof bowl over barely simmering water works; keep the water off the base of the bowl.
- Slake the flourMixing the flour with a little cold milk before adding it prevents lumps. If the pinch of raw-flour taste bothers you, the eight to ten minutes of cooking called for is precisely what removes it.
- Vanilla lastAdding vanilla only after the cream has cooled keeps the extract's alcohol from carrying the aroma off with the steam.
- Yield and keepingNo yield is given; the ingredients suggest something over a cup, enough to fill a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Press plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface to stop a skin forming, chill, and use within two days.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was the oldest chocolate maker in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising in the guise of a cookbook: the formulas name Baker's products, and "Premium No. 1" was the company's plain unsweetened cake chocolate. Booklets like this one, compiled with recipes credited to Boston cooking-school teachers, did a great deal to move chocolate in American homes from a drink to a baking ingredient. The filling itself is a straightforward pastry cream of the sort taught in the cooking schools of the period — milk, yolks, sugar, a little flour — with chocolate worked into the standard formula, and the insistence on level spoonfuls and the double boiler is the schoolroom's fingerprint on the page.