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Cold Chocolate Sauce
One cup of milk One egg One tablespoon of butter One-half cup of sugar One square of unsweetened chocolate One-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract One-eighth teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt
This entry gives quantities only, in the terse style of a premium cookbook where the method was assumed known. What it describes is a thin stirred custard flavored with chocolate, served cold over ice cream, puddings or plain cake.
- The missing methodMelt the chocolate with the butter, whisk in the sugar and salt, then the hot milk; pour a little of that into the beaten egg, return everything to the pan and stir over low heat until it coats a spoon. Chill before serving.
- The hinge: do not let it boilOne egg in one cup of milk is a very light custard, and it will curdle if the pan gets much past 175F. Stir constantly over low heat or a double boiler, and pull it the moment it thickens; if it does break, a quick blitz with an immersion blender will usually save it.
- Cook the egg throughBringing the sauce to 170-175F both sets the custard and takes care of the raw egg. A thermometer removes the guesswork here better than the spoon test does.
- One square of chocolateA square meant a 1 oz block of unsweetened baking chocolate; modern bars still work out to roughly an ounce per marked square, though packaging varies by brand. Unsweetened is essential -- with only half a cup of sugar in the whole batch, semisweet or a chocolate bar will throw the balance off.
- Larkin flavoring and saltLarkin sold groceries by mail order, and their products are named throughout this book as advertising. Any vanilla extract and any fine salt will do; an eighth teaspoon is a scant pinch, and it matters for the chocolate.
- It thickens as it coolsThe sauce will seem alarmingly thin while hot and set to a pourable cream in the refrigerator. If it stiffens too much overnight, slacken it with a spoonful of milk rather than reheating.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half -- enough for four to six servings over ice cream or a steamed pudding.
Good Things to Eat belongs to a genre that barely exists now: the cookbook given away as a premium. The Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, New York built an enormous mail-order business in the decades around 1900, selling soap and household goods direct to families and rewarding purchases with premiums, and its recipe booklets specified Larkin products -- here an extract and a table salt -- in the recipes themselves. The recipe is unremarkable for its date and that is rather the point: cooked chocolate custard sauces of this kind appear widely in American cookbooks of the period, which commonly gave proportions and left the handling of the custard to the cook. What she needed from the page was the proportions -- and the brand names.