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Chocolate Sauce (Cups milk ounces Walter Baker)
2 cups milk, 2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, Yolks 2 eggs, 1/8 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Sugar, Put chocolate, one-fourth cup sugar, and cold milk into double-boiler, and cook until milk is scalded. Mix yolks of eggs with one-third cup sugar and salt, and beat eight minutes. Pour milk gradually, while beating constantly, onto egg mixture; return to double-boiler and stir constantly until mixture thickens.
Strain, cool, and flavor with vanilla. This sauce may accompany cornstarch pudding, bread pudding, or cold cabinet pudding, or may be served in small glasses with whipped cream sweetened and flavored.
A stirred custard sauce built on unsweetened chocolate — essentially a crème anglaise with two ounces of chocolate carried in the milk. The whole thing hinges on heat control.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe custard thickens between about 170 and 180F and curdles above that. Keep the water in the lower pan hot but not boiling, stir constantly, and pull the pan the moment the sauce coats the spoon and holds a line drawn through it. The strainer in the original is insurance, not a fix for a broken custard.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, not sweetened eating chocolate. Substitute 2 ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped. Using semisweet instead will make the sauce cloying, since sugar is added separately.
- The sugar, which is listed twice"Sugar" appears in the ingredient list with no quantity because the amounts are given in the method: one-fourth cup with the chocolate and milk, one-third cup with the yolks. That is a scant 3/5 cup, about 9 tablespoons in total, for two cups of milk — moderately sweet by modern taste, and easily cut to a half cup.
- "Beat eight minutes"That timing assumes a hand whisk or a wire egg beater. With a stand mixer or electric hand mixer, two to three minutes gets the yolks pale, thick and fully dissolved, which is all the instruction is after.
- TemperingPouring the scalded chocolate milk in gradually while beating is what keeps the yolks from scrambling. Add the first half cup in a thin stream, then the rest more freely.
- Yield and storageAbout 2 1/2 cups, enough sauce for six to eight servings. Cover the surface with plastic wrap while cooling to prevent a skin, and keep it refrigerated; use within two days, and do not reheat over direct heat.
- Cabinet puddingThe suggested partner is a steamed or baked bread-and-custard pudding studded with candied fruit, set in a mould. Any bread pudding, panna cotta, or plain sponge takes the sauce equally well.
Booklets like this one were advertising in the guise of instruction: Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts — a chocolate mill operating from the late eighteenth century and among the oldest such firms in the United States — distributed collections of recipes that named its own products in the ingredient lists. Many of the recipes in these pamphlets came from or were shaped by the Boston Cooking School circle, though the fussy precision of "beat eight minutes" and the reflexive use of a double boiler in this one are suggestive rather than proof of that hand. The sauce itself is a chocolate crème anglaise, and the serving note — poured into small glasses under sweetened whipped cream — shows how thin the line was between a sauce and a dessert in its own right on a turn-of-the-century table.