Home › Recipes › Chocolate Sauce (Level tablespoonfuls of butter)
Chocolate Sauce (Level tablespoonfuls of butter)
2 level tablespoonfuls of butter, 1 level tablespoonful of flour, Pinch of salt, 1 cup of boiling water, 1 square of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 4 level tablespoonfuls of sugar, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla. Melt butter in a saucepan, add dry flour and salt and mix until smooth, then add slowly the hot water, beating well. Add the square of chocolate and sugar and stir until melted. Add vanilla, just before serving.
A butter-and-flour thickened chocolate sauce of the sort meant for ice cream, plain cake or steamed pudding. Everything hinges on the flour paste being smooth before any liquid goes in.
- The square of chocolateBaker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in 1-ounce squares. Use 1 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped; do not substitute semisweet or the sugar balance shifts.
- Sweetness is restrainedSweetness is moderate -- four level tablespoonfuls of sugar to a single ounce of unsweetened chocolate in a cup of water gives a thin, lightly sweet sauce rather than a rich one. Taste it and add more sugar if it is going onto something plain.
- Cook the flour brieflyMelt the butter, stir in the flour and salt, and let the paste bubble for half a minute before the water goes in. Raw flour left uncooked gives the sauce a pasty taste that the chocolate will not cover.
- Add the water slowlyBoiling water into a hot roux will seize and lump if it is poured in all at once. A little at a time, beating between additions, then the rest.
- Vanilla off the heatThe instruction to add it just before serving is deliberate. Vanilla's aroma is volatile and simmering it away wastes it.
- ConsistencyWith only a tablespoonful of flour to a cup of water this stays a thin sauce, though it thickens somewhat as it cools. Loosen it with a spoonful of hot water or milk when reheating, over low heat, stirring.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for four to six servings over ice cream or pudding.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts traced its chocolate mills back to the 1760s, though the firm only took the Walter Baker name in the 1820s; by the turn of the twentieth century it was among the most widely recognised chocolate names in American kitchens. Booklets like Choice Recipes were promotional literature: recipes gathered and printed by the company, calling for its products by their trade names, and distributed free or for a few cents to keep those names in the pantry. "Premium No. 1" was the firm's plain unsweetened baking chocolate, and the fact that recipes could simply say "one square" and expect to be understood shows how thoroughly standardised the 1-ounce square had become. The sauce itself is a small piece of nineteenth-century technique — a butter-and-flour roux thinned with water, the same foundation used for savoury white sauces, here turned to dessert. Flour does the work here that a modern kitchen would more likely give to cream or more chocolate, and the result is lighter and less rich than a ganache-style sauce.