Foamy Sauce
Yolk 1 egg, 1 cup powdered sugar, 1/2 cup scalded milk, 1 teaspoonful cornstarch, 1/8 teaspoonful salt, 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, White 1 egg.
Beat egg yolk until thick, and add gradually, while beating constantly, three-fourths of the sugar. Mix remaining sugar with cornstarch and salt, and pour on gradually the scalded milk. Cook in double-boiler, ten minutes, stirring constantly until mixture thickens, then occasionally. Combine mixtures and add flavoring and egg white, beaten until stiff. CHOCOLATE PUDDING Marshmallow Mint Sauce 1 quart milk, 1 1/2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/4 teaspoonful salt, 2 tablespoonfuls granulated gelatine, 3 tablespoonfuls cold water, 1/3 cup sugar.
Put milk and chocolate in double-boiler, and when milk has scalded and chocolate melted, beat until smooth, using a wire whisk; then add sugar, salt, and gelatine, which has soaked in cold water ten minutes. As soon as gelatine has dissolved, strain and turn into a mould first dipped in cold water. Chill, remove from mould and pour around it
Two separate items have run together on this page: a foamy sauce, then the start of a moulded chocolate pudding whose accompanying marshmallow mint sauce is cut off mid-sentence. Treat them as two recipes and expect the second to be incomplete.
- The hinge: keep the heat gentleThe cornstarch-milk mixture should thicken in the double boiler without approaching a boil. The yolk is not cooked at all in this recipe; the sweetened yolk is combined with the cooked base afterwards, so let the base cool slightly before combining or the yolk may curdle and leave the sauce grainy.
- Powdered sugarIn this period 'powdered sugar' generally meant a finely ground sugar, coarser than what was then sold as confectioners' sugar; modern confectioners' sugar also carries roughly 3 percent starch, so it is not an exact equivalent.
- Squares of chocolateA Walter Baker square is 1 ounce of unsweetened chocolate, so 1 1/2 squares is 1 1/2 oz. Premium No. 1 was unsweetened; do not substitute a sweetened baking bar without cutting the sugar.
- Granulated gelatineTwo tablespoons is closer to two and a half to three modern 1/4-oz envelopes (about 2/3 oz), which will set a quart of milk quite firmly for unmoulding. Three tablespoons of cold water is less than current practice recommends for blooming that much gelatin; use enough to wet it fully.
- Raw egg whiteThe stiffly beaten white is folded in uncooked and never reaches a pasteurizing temperature. If the sauce is going to sit at room temperature or be served to anyone vulnerable, use pasteurized shell eggs.
- Scalded milkScalding was originally done to kill enzymes and organisms in raw milk. With pasteurized milk it serves only to speed dissolving and warm the mixture, so heating to just below a simmer is enough.
- TimingTen minutes in a double boiler is right for cornstarch, which needs sustained heat to lose its raw taste and reach full thickening power. Cutting it short leaves a chalky edge.
- UnmouldingRinsing the mould in cold water rather than oiling it is deliberate and still works. Chill at least four hours; a quart mould set in a deep shape may need overnight.
- YieldThe foamy sauce makes roughly 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings of pudding. The chocolate pudding serves six to eight.
Choice Recipes was one of a long series of pamphlets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the oldest chocolate firm in the United States, and its purpose was to put the company's Premium No. 1 unsweetened cake into as many domestic puddings as possible. Foamy sauce belongs to a family of Anglo-American pudding sauces that ran from plain hard sauce (butter and sugar) through creamy and foamy versions to full sabayon, all of them ways of giving a steamed or moulded pudding richness without a proper custard. Recipes of this type were closely associated with the Boston Cooking School, which is often said to have supplied writers for the promotional literature of New England food manufacturers in the 1890s and 1900s, and the clipped, imperative style here ("Cook in double-boiler, ten minutes") reads very much like that school's manner. The moulded chocolate pudding on the same page reflects the newer availability of reliable granulated gelatin, which by this period had replaced the laborious business of boiling down calves' feet and made cold gelatin desserts an everyday matter.