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Chocolate Balls
2 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate grated 24 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 4 egg whites ¼ teaspoon salt Cream butter; add chocolate and sugar, flour in which baking powder and salt have been sifted, and milk; beat well, cut and fold in beaten whites of eggs. Pour into individual molds or popover cups and steam forty minutes. Serve with chocolate sauce.
A steamed pudding baked in individual cups rather than one large mold, from a book published to sell Walter M. Lowney's chocolate. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so treat the quantities below with care.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives no amounts for butter, sugar or milk, though all three are called for in the method. A steamed batter of this kind usually runs to roughly half a cup of butter, a cup of sugar and about three-quarters of a cup of milk for two-plus cups of flour, but the original does not say.
- Flour quantity will not read as writtenThe salt is correctly given as a quarter teaspoon. "24 cups flour" is almost certainly 2 1/4 cups, which is consistent with 3 teaspoons of baking powder; do not scale from that figure as printed.
- Lowney's Premium ChocolateThis was plain unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in squares of about an ounce, the same thing sold today as unsweetened or 100% cacao baking chocolate. The recipe calls for it grated rather than melted; melting and cooling it works as well.
- Steaming, not bakingThe molds go into a covered pot on a rack above an inch or two of simmering water, not into the oven. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Cover the moldsButter the cups, fill them no more than two-thirds, and cap each with foil or a buttered round of parchment tied on. Uncovered, condensation drips in and the tops turn slick and heavy.
- Forty minutes is about rightIndividual portions this size are done when a skewer comes out clean, which in practice is 35 to 45 minutes. Unlike an oven-baked cake they will not dry out quickly, so err on the longer side.
- Popover cupsDeep straight-sided cups of about 2/3 cup capacity. Ramekins, custard cups or a muffin tin covered tightly with foil all substitute; a muffin tin's shallower cups will be done sooner, so start testing early.
- Yield and servingExpect eight to ten small puddings. They are meant to come out hot and be sauced immediately; the chocolate sauce is a separate recipe in the same book, and any thin warm chocolate sauce serves.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907, compiled by Maria Willett Howard) was a promotional volume for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the American chocolate makers that grew up in the decades after the Civil War. Its purpose was to get plain unsweetened chocolate into as many household dishes as possible, which is why chocolate turns up here in a steamed pudding, a form that in the nineteenth century was far more often flavored with suet, spice and dried fruit. Steaming in individual molds may well have been a practical choice in a period when many kitchens still cooked on a coal range with unreliable oven heat: a covered pot of simmering water held a steady temperature the oven could not, and it gave a moist crumb without a crust.