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Chocolate Pudding
1/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar Yolks 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1 3/8 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Whites 2 eggs 1 1/3 squares unsweetened chocolate 1/8 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter, and add one-half the sugar gradually. Beat yolks of eggs until thick and lemon-colored, and add, gradually, remaining sugar. Combine mixtures, and add milk alternately with flour mixed and sifted with baking powder and salt; then add whites of eggs beaten until stiff, melted chocolate, and vanilla. Bake in an angel-cake pan, remove from pan, cool, fill the centre with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored, and pour around. Chocolate Sauce. Boil one cup sugar, one-half cup water, and a few grains cream-of-tartar until of the consistency of a thin syrup. Melt one and one-half squares chocolate and pour on gradually the hot syrup. Cool slightly, and flavor with one-fourth teaspoon vanilla.
This is a butter cake baked in a tube pan and served warm as a pudding, with whipped cream in the well and chocolate sauce poured around it. Nothing in the original states an oven temperature or a baking time.
- Oven and timingThe original gives neither. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits this batter; in a standard 9-inch tube pan it sits shallow, so start testing at about 25 minutes.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. The cake takes 1 1/3 squares (about 1 1/3 oz) and the sauce a further 1 1/2 oz; buy a 4 oz bar and you will have enough for both with a little to spare.
- The odd flour measure1 3/8 cups is 1 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons. With only 1/2 cup milk the batter is stiff, so rounding up risks a dry cake. Weigh it if you can: roughly 170 g of all-purpose flour.
- Folding orderThe whipped whites go in before the melted chocolate, which is the reverse of modern habit and risks knocking the air out while you work the chocolate through. Fold in about a third of the whites, stir in the barely-warm chocolate and vanilla, then fold in the rest.
- Chocolate temperatureMelted chocolate must be warm, not hot, when it meets the batter, or it will set into flecks against the cold egg white. Cool it to just above body temperature.
- The sauceBoiling sugar and water to "a thin syrup" means only a light syrup, well short of the thread stage: a minute or two at a full boil past the point where the sugar has dissolved. The cream of tartar is there to stop it crystallising, so do not leave it out. Pour the hot syrup onto the melted chocolate gradually, whisking, or it will seize.
- ServingThe original says to turn the cake out and cool it before filling the centre with sweetened, flavoured whipped cream; filling it hot would melt the cream. The sauce is poured around the base rather than over the top.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks drew the line between cake and pudding by service rather than by batter: a sweet baked in a mould, turned out, and sent to table under a sauce belonged in the pudding chapter whatever its crumb. This one is squarely in the Boston Cooking School manner " creamed butter, separated eggs, baking powder, and measurements pinned down to the eighth of a cup, the style Fannie Farmer's followers spread through domestic-science teaching. The unsweetened chocolate in one-ounce squares is a marker of the period: cake chocolate was sold pressed and scored into ounce portions, which is why so many recipes of the era are written in squares rather than weights. The tube pan, called an angel-cake pan here, takes its name from the egg-white foam cakes baked in it, and its hollow centre suited the whipped-cream filling this recipe calls for.