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Chocolate Sauce No. 2
1 pint milk Yolks of 2 eggs ½ cup sugar 1 square chocolate Put the milk to scald in top of double boiler, and add chocolate and sugar. Beat eggs till light and pour over them the scalded milk, Return to boiler and cook till it thickens and coats the spoon, stirring constantly. Serve hot.
A thin pouring custard flavoured with chocolate — closer to a crème anglaise than to the thick glossy sauce the name suggests today. The whole thing hangs on not letting the eggs curdle.
- The square of chocolateIn Canadian and American books of this period a "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in scored bars. Use 1 oz unsweetened; if you substitute semi-sweet, cut the sugar to about 1/3 cup.
- MeasuresA pint here is most likely 2 cups; Canadian books of the period varied between the 16-oz and the 20-oz Imperial pint, so if the sauce comes out thin, that is why. Half a cup of sugar is about 100 g.
- The hinge: never let it boilCook the custard only until it coats the back of a spoon and leaves a clear track when you draw a finger through it — around 170-175°F. Past about 180°F the yolks scramble and the sauce turns grainy. The double boiler is not fussiness; it is the only real protection.
- TemperingPouring the scalded milk over the beaten yolks in a thin stream while whisking is the point of that step. Dumping it in at once will set the eggs in threads before you get the pan back on the heat.
- Melting the chocolateChop or grate the chocolate before it goes into the hot milk so it disperses evenly, and whisk until no specks remain; a whole square will melt in the end, but slowly and unevenly.
- If it does curdleStrain immediately through a fine sieve into a cold bowl and whisk. Slight graininess is recoverable; full scrambling is not.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 cups, enough for six servings. The book says only to serve it hot; a sauce like this would suit steamed or cottage puddings or plain cake. It thickens noticeably as it cools and will need thinning with a little milk if reheated.
Pudding sauces occupy their own chapter in nearly every early twentieth-century household book because the puddings they accompanied — steamed, boiled, baked in a basin — were deliberately plain, and the sauce carried the flavour and the sense of occasion. The Five Roses Cook Book, published from 1913 by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as an advertisement for its flour, was compiled from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, which may explain why so many entries appear in numbered variants: No. 1, No. 2, and so on. This one is a stirred egg custard, the technique the French call crème anglaise, with chocolate added. The instruction to cook "till it coats the spoon" is the traditional test, used long before any home cook owned a thermometer.