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Hot Chocolate Sauce
1 cup of boiling water, Pinch of salt, 1 square of Walter Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/2 a cup of sugar.
Cook all together slowly until it is the consistency of maple syrup, or thicker if desired. Just before serving, add one teaspoonful of vanilla. This will keep indefinitely, and can be reheated.
A three-ingredient water-based chocolate syrup of the kind that predates canned fudge sauce. The whole recipe turns on how far you reduce it, since it thickens considerably as it cools.
- One square of chocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened chocolate sold in blocks scored into ounce squares. Use 1 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped, not a modern semisweet square, which would throw off the sugar balance.
- Stop short of where you think you shouldThe syrup looks thin in the pan and thickens noticeably on cooling. Pull it when it coats a spoon lightly; taken to a full maple-syrup consistency while hot it will be very stiff once cold, though the recipe itself allows 'thicker if desired'.
- Slowly means slowlyA bare simmer over low heat; expect something in the region of 10 to 15 minutes, judged by consistency rather than the clock. A hard boil risks catching the chocolate on the pan bottom and turning the sauce bitter.
- Chocolate firstMelt the chopped chocolate into a little of the hot water and whisk smooth before adding the rest, or you will chase unmelted lumps around the pan for the whole cooking time.
- Vanilla off the heatThe instruction to add it just before serving is deliberate. Vanilla's aromatics are volatile and simmering them off wastes the extract.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a cup of finished sauce, enough for four to six servings over ice cream or plain cake.
- "Keep indefinitely"Reasonable by the standards of the period for a sugar syrup with no dairy in it, but treat it as a fortnight in a covered jar in the refrigerator. Reheat gently with a spoonful of water to loosen it.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts was among the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, and its *Choice Recipes* booklets were promotional literature — free or near-free pamphlets that put the company's Premium No. 1 and Breakfast Cocoa into as many household recipes as possible. That commercial purpose explains the brand name embedded in the ingredient list, a convention common to manufacturer cookbooks of the period. The sauce itself belongs to the soda-fountain era, when chocolate syrup was made with water rather than cream: unsweetened chocolate, sugar and water cooked down is often said to resemble the sort of formula fountains used for chocolate sodas and sundaes, and it keeps far better than a dairy sauce in a kitchen without reliable refrigeration.