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Chocolate Pudding (Tablespoons butter Yolks)
3 tablespoons butter, Yolks of 2 eggs, 1/2 cup milk, 2 tablespoons baking powder, 1 cup sugar, 2 ozs. Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, melted, 1 1/2 cups flour, Whites of 2 eggs.
Mix in order given, bake in muffin pans about 25 minutes. Serve with
A small chocolate cake batter baked in muffin tins and served as individual puddings under a sauce. The original assumes a cook who knows what "mix in order given" implies and gives no oven temperature.
- The baking powder is almost certainly a misprintThe baking powder looks like a misprint -- two tablespoons to 1 1/2 cups of flour is roughly three to four times the usual proportion, and at that level a batter is apt to taste soapy and to rise and fall. Two teaspoons is nearer what this quantity of flour wants.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the stated 25 minutes suits muffin pans of this size.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, not a sweetened eating bar. Substitute 2 ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate; using semisweet will throw the cup of sugar badly out of balance.
- "Mix in order given"Taken literally this means the sequence of the printed list, which puts milk and baking powder before the sugar and the melted chocolate. A creaming approach -- butter and sugar, then yolks, then chocolate and milk, then flour, whites last -- is a reasonable modern reading; the whites are best beaten and folded in at the end.
- A stiff batterHalf a cup of milk against 1 1/2 cups of flour gives something closer to a thick drop batter than a pourable one. Spoon it into the cups rather than pouring, and fill about two-thirds.
- YieldAbout twelve standard muffin-pan puddings, or eight in larger cups with a few minutes added to the baking.
- The missing sauceThe text as given breaks off at "Serve with." A hot chocolate sauce, a vanilla or hard sauce, or plain whipped cream all belong to the period and all suit the pudding.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate makers in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising in the guise of a cookbook, meant to give home cooks a standing reason to buy Premium No. 1 chocolate. The convention of calling a baked cake batter a "pudding" is often met with in American books of this period, where pudding meant the sweet course rather than any particular texture; the batter here is baked in muffin pans rather than one dish. Recipes of this kind were contributed or compiled and then printed with minimal editing.