Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Puff Paste › Puff Paste: Chocolate-Cream
Puff Paste: Chocolate-Cream
1/2 cupful Runkel's Chocolate, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla. 1/2 cupful sugar, 1 1/2 squares Runkel's Chocolate, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla. 1/2 pint chopped suet, 1/4 pound citron, 1/2 pint molasses, Chocolate Pie. 2 cupfuls scalding milk, 3 eggs, 4 tablespoonfuls sugar, cupful Runkel's Chocolate, 1/4 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Make a custard by pouring milk gradually upon eggs that have been well beaten and sugar. Return to fire, stir in chocolate, remove from fire, add vanilla, and pour the mixture into a pie plate lined with puff paste. Bake until set. Make a meringue of the whites of eggs and a tablespoonful powdered sugar, and spread on top of the pie. Brown delicately.
Chocolate-Cream Pie. 1 tablespoonful cornstarch, cupful sugar, 2 cupfuls scalding milk, 3 eggs, 1½ squares Runkel's Chocolate, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla. a Melt the chocolate in a double boiler with the sugar, pour over it the scalding milk, add the cornstarch, and cook five minutes; then beat in the whipped eggs. Cook till the mixture is custardy, add a dash salt, also butter and vanilla, pour into a freshly baked pie shell. Serve ice cold. If you wish to enrich this delicious pie, you may serve it with a meringue or a top of whipped cream.
Mince-Meat. 2 1/4 pounds round of beef, 2 quarts chopped apples, pint chopped suet, 1½ pints raisins, 1 pint currants, 1 pound citron, 1 quart sugar, pint molasses, 3 pints cider, 2 tablespoonfuls salt, 4 tablespoonfuls cinnamon, 1 tablespoonful allspice, 1 tablespoonful mace, 1 teaspoonful cloves, 4 nutmegs grated, 4 lemons.
Put the beef in a small stewpan and cover with boiling water. Cook three hours, having the water only bubble at one side of the stewpan.
Take from the fire and let the meat cool in the water, with the cover off the pan. When cold, remove fat and gristle, and chop the meat rather fine.
Put it in a large bowl with all the other ingredients, except the cider, and mix thoroughly. Now, add the cider, and let the mixture stand in a cold place overnight. In the morning turn the mince-meat into a porcelain kettle and heat slowly to the boiling point; then simmer gently an hour. Put the mixture into stone jars and set away in a cold place; or it may be put in glass jars and sealed.
It will keep for years in this way.
When the pies are being made, 1 tumbler jelly or marmalade to 3 or 4 pies will be found a great improvement.-MARIA PARLOA.
Two chocolate custard pies and a mincemeat sit together on this page. The pies are workable with modern equivalents; the mincemeat, which is directed to be sealed in glass jars and kept for years, is not.
- Why the mincemeat failsA cooked mixture of beef, suet, apples and sugar is a low-acid food, and simmering an hour then sealing it into stone or glass jars does nothing to destroy Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive boiling and thrive in the airless interior of a sealed jar. The cider is not present in a measured, tested proportion, so no acidity claim can be made for it. Use a current tested pressure-canning procedure for mincemeat, or make it in small batches and freeze it.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities on this page have lost their fractions in printing: the chocolate in the first pie, the sugar in the second, and the suet and molasses in the mincemeat. The beef, printed as '21 pounds', is plainly a mangled fraction as well. Treat those numbers as unknown rather than guessing at the printed figure.
- Runkel's chocolateA brand of baking chocolate from Runkel Brothers. Squares of baking chocolate were conventionally an ounce each, so read the 1½ squares in the cream pie as roughly 1½ oz; unsweetened baking chocolate is the closest modern match.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaAn advertiser's product, long gone. Ordinary pure vanilla extract in the same quantity. Both pie recipes name brands in their ingredient lists, which reads as manufacturer-sponsored copy.
- Scalding milkMilk heated to about 180F, just until it shivers and a skin begins to form at the edge, not boiled. Pour it into the eggs in a thin stream while whisking, or the eggs will scramble.
- Bake until setFor the first pie, 325 to 350F. The custard is done when the outer two inches are firm and the center still wobbles as a single mass; it finishes setting as it cools. A knife-clean center means it is overbaked and will weep.
- Browning the meringue"Brown delicately" means a hot, short pass: 400F for 6 to 8 minutes, watching it. Note that the first recipe uses three whole eggs in the custard and then asks for the whites for meringue, so you will need two or three extra whites.
- The cream pie is stovetopThe second pie is a cornstarch-thickened pastry cream poured into an already-baked shell, so the crust must be blind-baked fully and cooled. Cook it until it thickens and just bubbles to gelatinize the starch and kill the amylase in the yolks, then chill at least four hours.
- Puff paste under custardTrue puff paste gets soggy fast beneath a wet custard. Blind-bake it well, and serve the same day; a standard short pastry holds up better if you would rather not fight it.
- YieldRoughly enough for one 9-inch plate each, six to eight wedges.
Custard pies thickened with nothing but egg, and their slightly later cousins stiffened with cornstarch, were the backbone of American home dessert once cheap chocolate arrived in convenient one-ounce squares in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Runkel Brothers of New York and a handful of competitors pushed those squares hard, and one common route to a housewife's shelf was the sponsored recipe leaflet in which every ingredient list politely named a brand. Maria Parloa, whose mincemeat closes the page, was one of the most trusted culinary authorities of the era, an early instructor at the Boston Cooking School, founder of her own schools in Boston and New York, and a prolific writer; her name attached to a recipe signalled reliability the way a test-kitchen stamp does now, and branded-ingredient compilations of this kind were commonly manufacturer-produced or subsidised. Her instruction that the mincemeat "will keep for years" reflects genuine period practice, when heavy sugar, suet and spice were understood as preservatives in their own right, and the bacteriology that would eventually explain why sealed low-acid preserves are dangerous was still being worked out.