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Mrs. Bedford's Hot Cocoa Sauce for Ice-Cream
Boil together one and one-half cupfuls of water and one cupful of sugar for two minutes; add one tablespoonful of arrowroot dissolved in a little cold water, stir for a moment, then boil until clear. Add two tablespoonfuls of cocoa which has been dissolved in a little hot water and a tiny pinch of salt and boil three minutes longer. Take from the fire and add one teaspoonful of vanilla.--Mrs. Cornelia C. Bedford.
A clear, arrowroot-thickened cocoa sauce meant to go hot over cold ice-cream. It is not an ancestor of hot fudge: there is no cream, no butter and no block chocolate in it, and the whole reason for the arrowroot is that it thickens without clouding.
- Arrowroot, not cornstarchArrowroot sets to a clear, glossy gel where cornstarch turns opaque and tastes faintly raw. That is why the recipe tells you to boil "until clear" rather than giving a time. Cornstarch will work at the same quantity if it is what you have, but the sauce will be cloudy.
- Slake the starch firstArrowroot tipped dry into boiling syrup seizes into lumps that never disperse. Stir it smooth in a tablespoonful or two of cold water before it goes in, and keep the syrup moving as you add it.
- Do not overboil itArrowroot behaves opposite to cornstarch here. Prolonged boiling breaks the gel down and the sauce slackens again, so the three minutes after the cocoa goes in is about all it will take. If you substitute cornstarch this stops mattering and you should give it a good two minutes instead.
- The cocoa goes in as a paste tooDry cocoa dropped into syrup floats and clumps, so it is dissolved in a little hot water first. This is Walter Baker's Breakfast Cocoa, a plain natural cocoa; Dutch-process will give you a darker, rounder, less acidic sauce.
- It is a thin sauce by designA cup of sugar to a cup and a half of water, carrying one tablespoonful of starch, is closer to a syrup than to anything you would call fudge sauce. Poured hot over ice-cream it stiffens slightly on contact, which is the whole effect.
- The pinch of salt is not decorationWith no dairy and no butter in it, salt is the only thing sharpening what is otherwise sugar, water and cocoa. A tiny pinch is what the recipe says; an eighth of a teaspoonful is about right.
- Vanilla off the heatAs written, and for the usual reason: vanilla is volatile and boiling drives most of it off. The sauce keeps about a week refrigerated and reheats gently, though an arrowroot sauce loses a little body each time.
This sauce belongs to the soda fountain. By the time the booklet was printed the American drugstore counter had turned chocolate over ice-cream into an everyday order rather than a dinner-party dessert, and the pages near the front of this same book give recipes for chocolate syrup, a chocolate ice-cream soda and a chocolate milk shake -- the fountain repertoire, rewritten for a domestic kitchen. Arrowroot, the starch washed from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea and imported largely from the West Indies, was the costly thickener of the period, valued for exactly the clarity this recipe tells you to watch for, and it had a long prior career in invalid cookery before confectioners took it up. The contributor, Cornelia Campbell Bedford, was superintendent of the New York Cooking School.