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Chocolate Sauce
1 C sugar 1 T cornstarch 2 squares bitter chocolate 1 C boiling water Boil until it thickens. Good on ice cream.
Laura Mae Grummitt.
A four-ingredient cornstarch-thickened chocolate sauce of the kind church cookbooks printed by the dozen. The only real trap is lumping, and it is easily avoided.
- Slake the cornstarch firstWhisk the cornstarch into the dry sugar before any liquid goes in. Dropped into boiling water on its own it seizes into lumps that no amount of boiling will smooth out.
- "2 squares bitter chocolate"Baking chocolate was customarily sold in 1-ounce squares, so this most likely means about 2 oz unsweetened chocolate. "Bitter" here means unsweetened rather than bittersweet; with only 1 cup of sugar, substituting sweetened chocolate throws the balance off.
- How long to boilCornstarch reaches full thickening power within a minute or two of a real boil. Two to three minutes of gentle bubbling with constant stirring is enough; longer cooking can break the starch down and thin the sauce again.
- Judge it thinPull it when it coats the spoon but still pours freely. Cornstarch sauces set noticeably as they cool, and a sauce that looks right in the pan will be pudding on the ice cream.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups depending on how long it boils, enough for six to eight servings. Being water- and sugar-based with no dairy, it keeps several days refrigerated and loosens with a spoonful of hot water when reheated.
- What the original omitsSalt and vanilla appear in many similar sauces of the period; neither is called for here, and adding a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla off the heat is an optional modern addition rather than something the recipe implies.
Cornstarch-thickened chocolate sauce belongs to the period when commercial cornstarch and boxed unsweetened baking chocolate had both become cheap pantry staples, letting a cook produce a glossy sauce without cream, butter, or eggs. Community cookbooks like this one gathered contributions each signed by its donor, which is why Laura Mae Grummitt's name sits under four lines of instruction that assume the reader already knows what a thickened sauce should look like. The brevity is not carelessness but shared knowledge among neighbors who cooked the same way.