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Chocolate Cream Filling
1/2 cake chocolate, grated, 2/3 cupful milk, 1/2 cupful sugar, 1 tablespoonful butter, pinch salt, 1 teaspoonful extract vanilla. Boil gently till thick.
A three-minute filling with no starch or egg in it: the body comes entirely from boiling milk and sugar down with chocolate until it thickens. That makes the finish point the whole recipe.
- "1/2 cake chocolate"Grocers sold unsweetened chocolate in moulded cakes, and the weight of a "cake" was not standard across brands, so this is genuinely ambiguous; a half cake could be anywhere from about 2 to 4 oz. For 2/3 cup milk and 1/2 cup sugar, around 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate gives a filling of workable richness.
- Unsweetened, not eating chocolateThe chocolate meant here is plain and bitter, which is why half a cup of sugar goes in. Substituting semisweet or a chocolate bar will make the filling cloying.
- Grate itGrating is not fussiness. Chunks of chocolate dropped into hot milk sink, sit on the pan bottom and scorch before they melt.
- "Boil gently"Low heat, uncovered, stirring almost continuously with a flat-edged spoon or heatproof spatula that reaches the corners of the pan. Milk and sugar catch quickly, and a scorched batch cannot be rescued.
- How to know when it is thickExpect roughly 8 to 12 minutes. It is done when the mixture coats the spoon heavily and a spatula drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly. It will thicken a good deal more as it cools, so stop while it still pours.
- Vanilla and butter at the endThe recipe gives no order, but it is usual to stir the butter in off the heat for gloss and add the vanilla last, since prolonged boiling drives off much of the extract's aroma.
- YieldSomething in the region of a cupful, enough for a single layer's worth of filling. Cool to spreading consistency before using; if it stiffens too far, a teaspoon of hot milk beaten in will loosen it.
Fillings of this kind belong to the era when a household bought chocolate as a hard, unsweetened cake and did its own sweetening, and recipes of the period commonly pair grated chocolate with a generous measure of sugar. What distinguishes this one from pastry-cream fillings is the absence of flour, cornstarch or egg yolk: it is simply a milk-and-sugar reduction, closer in method to a fudge sauce than to a custard, and it thickens by evaporation and the concentration of the sugar rather than by starch. Terse instructions of this kind assume a cook already familiar with the method, which is why the direction amounts to four words.