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Chocolate Sauce (Boil one cup sugar one-half)
Boil one cup sugar, one-half cup water and a few grains cream-of-tartar seven minutes. Melt one and one-half squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate and pour on gradually, while stirring constantly, the hot syrup. Flavor with one-fourth teaspoon vanilla.
BERKSHIRE CORNSTARCH PUDDING (Without Eggs) 2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 2 cups milk, 1/4 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons cornstarch, 1/4 cup milk, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.
Put chocolate and two cups milk in double-boiler and cook until milk has scalded and chocolate has melted, stirring occasionally. Mix sugar, cornstarch and salt, add remaining milk and stir until thoroughly blended. Add cornstarch mixture gradually to chocolate mixture and cook ten minutes, stirring constantly until mixture thickens and afterwards occasionally. Turn into a serving dish and chill. Serve with or without sugar and cream.
Two recipes run together here: a poured chocolate syrup sauce and an eggless cornstarch pudding to serve it over. Both hinge on the same ingredient, and on knowing what "a square" meant.
- What a "square" isWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, sold in a cake scored into one-ounce squares. Use 1 1/2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate for the sauce, 2 oz for the pudding. Semisweet or chips will throw both recipes badly out of balance on sugar.
- The seven-minute boilOne cup sugar to half a cup water boiled seven minutes will carry the syrup somewhere in the thread-to-soft-ball range, but how far depends entirely on your pan and burner. If you have a thermometer, trust it over the clock: your pan and burner are not the ones the recipe was written for. Underboiled, the sauce stays thin; taken much further, it will set stiff as it cools.
- Cream of tartar"A few grains" means a pinch, no more than 1/8 teaspoon. It inverts some of the sucrose so the syrup does not crystallize into a grainy sauce. It is not a flavor ingredient and more is not better.
- Pour the syrup onto the chocolate, not the reverseThe order is deliberate. Adding hot syrup gradually to melted chocolate while stirring keeps the emulsion smooth; dumping cold chocolate into boiling syrup gives you seized lumps. Add the vanilla off the heat so it does not cook off.
- Double boilerThe pudding calls for one; the sauce leaves the melting method unspecified. For the pudding, a heatproof bowl over simmering water works the same way and is worth using: cornstarch and milk scorch readily over direct heat, and the ten-minute cook is long.
- Cook the cornstarch fullyTen minutes is not padding. Cornstarch thickens well before its raw, chalky taste cooks out, and a double boiler heats slowly. Stir constantly until it thickens, then occasionally, and give it the full time.
- Chilling and unmoldingThe original turns it into a serving dish, which is how to treat it — three tablespoons cornstarch to 2 1/4 cups milk sets soft, not firm enough to turn out of a mold cleanly. Press a round of plastic wrap onto the surface if you dislike skin. Chill at least three hours.
- YieldThe pudding serves four modestly; the sauce makes about three-quarters of a cup, enough for those four servings or for a quart of ice cream. The sauce keeps a week refrigerated and needs gentle rewarming.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, and its promotional cookbooks — Choice Recipes ran through many editions around the turn of the twentieth century — were written partly by well-known cooking-school figures of the day, including Fannie Farmer and Maria Parloa. The recipes name the company's products by grade, and "Premium No. 1" was the plain unsweetened cake that home cooks were expected to keep on hand; sweetened eating chocolate was a separate line. The "Berkshire" pudding sits in a whole genre of cornstarch blancmanges that filled American dessert tables once cheap boxed cornstarch arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, and the parenthetical "(Without Eggs)" is the selling point: a chocolate dessert that cost nothing in eggs and could not curdle.