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Chocolate Filling
4 tablespoons chocolate 1 pint boiling water 2 eggs (yolks) 2 tablespoons Five Roses flour 6 tablespoons sugar Mix and boil till thick
A flour-and-yolk chocolate pastry cream, written in the shorthand of a mill's promotional book, where the reader was assumed to know how a boiled filling behaves. Two details need attention before you start: the proportions are unusually thin, and the yolks need protecting from the boiling water.
- The hinge: temper the yolks"Mix and boil" glosses over the only step that can ruin this. Whisk the flour, sugar and yolks to a smooth paste, then pour the boiling water in slowly while whisking, and only then return the pan to the heat. Dumping the yolks into a pint of boiling water gives you chocolate soup with threads of scrambled egg.
- A pint is a lot of liquidTwo tablespoons of flour and two yolks will not set two cups of water into anything you can spread between cake layers; expect a thin sauce or pudding. Either halve the water or roughly triple the flour if you want a filling that stays put. This is a genuine weakness in the original, not a conversion problem.
- "4 tablespoons chocolate"Grated or shaved unsweetened baking chocolate, about 1 to 1.5 oz. Chocolate then was sold in bitter cakes for grating, not as chips; if you use chips or sweetened chocolate, drop the sugar to about 3 tablespoons.
- Five Roses flourThe Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour the book was written to sell. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the modern equivalent; nothing here depends on its strength.
- Boil it properlyOnce thickened, keep it at a bare boil for a full minute or two, stirring. Raw flour starch tastes pasty and will thin back out as it cools if it hasn't gelatinized fully.
- Sugar is restrainedSugar -- six tablespoons against unsweetened chocolate may read as restrained to some palates; taste and add more if you want it sweeter, stirring it in with the flour so it dissolves in the paste.
- Cooling and storagePress plastic wrap onto the surface to prevent a skin, cool to room temperature before spreading, and refrigerate. It is an egg custard: use it within two days.
- YieldAs written, roughly 2 cups of thin filling, enough for a two- or three-layer 8-inch cake or a cream pie.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, one of the large Canadian millers, and circulated by the hundreds of thousands as advertising for its Five Roses brand flour, so nearly every formula in it exists partly to name the product. Boiled fillings of this sort, thickened with a little flour and enriched with yolks, were the standard filling for layer cakes and cream pies in North American kitchens before packaged pudding mixes. Grated baking chocolate had become cheap and widely available by the turn of the century, which is why a chocolate filling could sit in a mill's giveaway book alongside plainer boiled custards. The extreme terseness is characteristic of the genre: the writer expected a cook who had already made a dozen boiled fillings and needed only the numbers.