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Chocolate Sauce No. 1
2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour Pinch of salt 1 cup boiling water 1 square chocolate 4 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla Melt butter in saucepan, add dry flour and salt. Mix until smooth, then add slowly the hot water, beating well. Add the square of chocolate and sugar, and stir until melted. Add vanilla just before serving.
A flour-thickened chocolate sauce of the old school — closer to a sweet béchamel than to the cream-and-chocolate ganache sauces that replaced it. It comes together in about five minutes on the stovetop.
- "1 square chocolate"A square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard scored block sold in eight-ounce packages. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct equivalent; semi-sweet or a chopped dark bar will work but will push the sauce sweeter and thinner, so cut the sugar back.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour, hard-wheat and relatively high in protein. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the substitute, and the single tablespoon here is doing modest work — this is a lightly bound pouring sauce, not a pudding.
- Cook the roux brieflyThe instruction to "mix until smooth" before the water goes in matters more than it looks. Give the butter and flour half a minute of bubbling so the sauce does not taste of raw flour, which chocolate hides less well than people expect.
- Add the water graduallyBoiling water hitting a hot roux all at once will seize into lumps. A little at a time with steady beating, then the rest, gives a smooth sauce; a whisk does this better than a spoon.
- SweetnessFour tablespoons of sugar against a full ounce of unsweetened chocolate makes a sauce that may read as under-sweet by current tastes. It was built to go over plain steamed puddings and dumplings that carried their own sugar; over ice cream you may want more.
- Vanilla lastAdding it off the heat, as directed, is deliberate — vanilla's aromatics are volatile and boil away. If the sauce has been sitting, warm it gently and stir the vanilla in at the end.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for four to six servings of pudding or dumplings. It thickens noticeably as it cools; thin with a spoonful of hot water or milk when reheating.
Flour-thickened dessert sauces were the standard finish for the boiled and steamed puddings that dominated North American home cooking well into the twentieth century — apple dumplings, roly-polys and steamed batter puddings all arrived at the table needing something poured over them. Butter, flour and hot water made a sauce from the pantry alone, with no cream required, which mattered in kitchens without reliable refrigeration. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and the recipes are written to keep flour in the cook's hand at every opportunity, sauces included; the numbering of this one as "No. 1" suggests it was one of several chocolate sauces offered.