Chocolate Pie

A flour-thickened chocolate cream filling of the plainest sort — no eggs, no butter, no vanilla. The recipe assumes you already know to bake a shell blind and to cook a starch paste until it loses its raw taste.

• A pint of milkTwo cups. With ½ cup sugar and 3 tablespoons flour, this yields enough filling for one 8- or 9-inch single-crust pie, serving 6 to 8.
• One square of chocolateA square generally meant 1 ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. One ounce in a whole pie is faint by current tastes; 2 to 3 ounces gives more depth, with a little more sugar to balance it.
• The shell is not mentionedNothing here is baked, so the crust must be fully blind-baked and cooled before the filling goes in. The book gives no instructions for the shell at all, so any temperature and timing are the modern cook's own.
• Flour, not cornstarchThree tablespoons of flour to 2 cups of milk is a light hand by later standards; expect a soft set that may not slice cleanly. Whisk the flour and sugar together dry, as directed, so the flour disperses; adding it straight to boiling milk without the sugar risks lumps.
• Cook it outThe hinge of the recipe. Once thickened, keep the filling at a bare simmer for a good 2 to 3 minutes, stirring constantly, or the pie tastes of raw flour.
• Grating the chocolateUnsweetened chocolate grated into cold milk disperses as the milk heats. Chopping fine works as well; dropping the square in whole leaves you chasing an unmelted lump.
• SettingPour hot into the cooled shell, press a round of buttered parchment or plastic directly on the surface to prevent a skin, and chill at least 3 hours before cutting. Whip the cream and add it only at serving.
• Worth addingA pinch of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla stirred in off the heat cost nothing and make an appreciable difference to a filling this spare.