Home › Pudding Sauces › Chocolate Sauce
Chocolate Sauce
2 cups milk 1 1/2 tablespoons corn-starch 2 squares unsweetened chocolate 4 tablespoons powdered sugar 2 tablespoons hot water 2 eggs 2/3 cup powdered sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla Scald one and three-fourths cups milk, add corn-starch diluted with remaining milk, and cook eight minutes in double boiler; melt chocolate over hot water, add four tablespoons sugar and hot water, stir until smooth, then add to cooked mixture; beat whites of eggs until stiff, add gradually powdered sugar and continue beating, then add unbeaten yolks, and stir into cooked mixture; cook one minute, add vanilla, and cool before serving.
A cooked chocolate custard sauce, thickened with both corn-starch and egg, meant to be spooned cool over a plain steamed or baked pudding. The whole thing lives or dies on the double boiler: the egg goes in at the end and must set without curdling.
- Chocolate squaresA "square" of unsweetened chocolate is 1 ounce, so this calls for 2 ounces total. Modern baking bars are often scored into 1-ounce sections; a 99-100% cacao bar weighed out works equally well.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period "powdered sugar" means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar is the closest match, and it dissolves into the beaten whites without leaving a starchy taste.
- The egg stageOnce the yolks go in, keep the sauce over hot, not boiling, water and stir constantly. One minute is a rough guide rather than a rule; work to about 170-175F on a thermometer, which both sets the egg safely and keeps it from graining.
- Corn-starch slurryDilute the corn-starch in the reserved 1/4 cup of cold milk before it meets the scalded milk. Eight minutes in the double boiler is what cooks out the raw starch flavour, so do not cut it short even though the sauce thickens sooner.
- Melting the chocolateChocolate melted over hot water with only 2 tablespoons of water and the sugar added may stiffen to a paste at first; keep stirring and it should smooth out. Add it to the warm milk base, not to a cold one, or it can set in specks.
- CoolingThe sauce is served cool, and it thickens noticeably as it sits. Stir before serving and thin with a spoonful of milk if it has gone past pouring consistency; a skin will form unless you cover the surface.
- YieldRoughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups, depending on how much volume the beaten whites hold; figure eight or so servings of pudding.
Pudding sauces occupied their own chapter in American cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1920s because the puddings themselves were deliberately plain: cornstarch blancmange, cottage pudding, steamed batter puddings, all cheap and all improved by something poured over them. A sauce like this one is essentially a soft custard with chocolate folded in, and the double boiler it depends on was a standard fixture of the domestic-science kitchen, recommended for cooking egg mixtures without curdling them. The use of stiffly beaten whites sweetened separately gives the finished sauce a light, foamy body that distinguishes it from a straight chocolate custard, a trick that appears under various names in the pudding-sauce chapters of the period.