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Chocolate Pudding
Scrape fine three ounces of chocolate. Add to it a teaspoonful of powdered nutmeg and one of cinnamon. Put it in a saucepan, and pour over it a quart of rich milk, stirring it well. Cover it and let it come to a boil. Then remove the lid, stir up the chocolate from the bottom and press out the lumps. When dissolved and smooth, put it on the fire again. Next stir in, gradually and while it is boiling hot, half a pound white sugar. Set it away to cool. Beat six or eight eggs very light. Pour into the pan of chocolate when quite cold. Stir the whole very hard. Put it in an oven and bake well. It will bake best by being put in a pan of boiling water. Eat cold.--Mrs. J.B.F., Jr. Chocolate Pudding. 1 quart milk. 3 eggs. Sugar to taste. 2 tablespoonfuls corn-starch, dissolved in milk. 4 tablespoonful chocolate Set the milk on the fire, and just before it boils put in the eggs, sugar, and corn-starch. Let it boil about a minute, then take it of the fire and add the chocolate.
Two versions sit side by side: a baked custard pudding and a quick stovetop cornstarch pudding. Both assume unsweetened block chocolate, which is why the first calls for half a pound of sugar.
- The chocolate"Three ounces of chocolate" scraped fine means hard unsweetened cake chocolate, the form commonly sold at the time. Use 3 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped or grated; if you substitute cocoa powder you will need roughly half the weight plus a little fat, and the texture will be thinner.
- SugarHalf a pound of white sugar is 8 oz by weight, a generous cup. That is calibrated to unsweetened chocolate — if you use semisweet or bittersweet, cut it back sharply or the pudding will be cloying.
- "Rich milk"Nineteenth-century milk came unhomogenized with cream on top. A quart of whole milk works; a quart of half whole milk and half light cream is closer to what was meant.
- Bake well, in a pan of boiling waterThis is the hinge. The recipe gives no temperature. A custard of 6–8 eggs to a quart of milk needs gentle, even heat: a moderate oven, in the region of 325F, in a water bath, roughly 45 to 60 minutes, until the center is just barely set and jiggles as one mass. Direct oven heat is likely to curdle it and make it weep.
- Cool the chocolate firstThe instruction to pour the eggs in when the chocolate base is "quite cold" is not fussiness — hot liquid poured onto beaten eggs scrambles them. If you would rather not wait, temper the eggs with a ladle of warm base, then combine.
- Egg countPeriod eggs ran smaller than today's large. Six large eggs give a firm sliceable custard; eight makes it dense and distinctly eggy. Six is the safer choice.
- The second recipe's chocolate"4 tablespoonful chocolate" is garbled in the original and probably means 4 tablespoons of grated chocolate. Adding it off the heat, as directed, will leave gritty flecks unless the mixture is still very hot and well stirred; melting it into the hot milk before thickening gives a smoother result.
- Cornstarch and eggs togetherThe second version boils eggs and cornstarch for a minute, which is correct for a starch-bound pudding — the starch protects the eggs from curdling. Stir constantly and do not stop at the first bubble, or the starch will not fully thicken and the pudding will taste chalky.
- YieldThe baked version makes roughly 1.5 quarts of custard; the stovetop version somewhat less. The first is expressly directed to be eaten cold.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why the same dish often appears two or three times over with different initials attached — here Mrs. J.B.F., Jr. supplies the older baked custard and an unnamed contributor the newer cornstarch one. The pairing catches chocolate at a turning point in American kitchens: the first recipe treats it as a spiced drink thickened into a pudding, still scented with nutmeg and cinnamon in the manner of colonial chocolate service, while the second treats it as a flavoring stirred into a starch-set blancmange of the sort that spread rapidly after cornstarch became a cheap commercial product in the 1840s and 1850s. Scraping chocolate by hand was ordinary labor at the time; cocoa powder produced by the Dutch alkalizing process was available but not yet standard in Southern households.