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Chocolate (Tablespoons boiling water) (II)
2 tablespoons boiling water 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Melt chocolate; add hot water. Mix sugar and cornstarch, add yolks of eggs and milk, and cook in double boiler until mixture thickens, stirring constantly. Add flavoring, salt and chocolate mixture.
This is one of two chocolate dessert entries in the book, and the printed text has lost most of its ingredient list — only the boiling water, salt and vanilla survived the typesetting. What remains is a chocolate cornstarch custard, and the method is complete enough to follow if you supply proportions from a comparable pudding.
- The list is truncatedThe instructions call for chocolate, sugar, cornstarch, egg yolks and milk, none of which appear with quantities. A standard chocolate blancmange of this period runs to about 2 cups milk, 1/3 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons cornstarch, 2 egg yolks and 1 to 2 ounces chocolate, but that is a reconstruction, not what the page says.
- The saltA full teaspoon of salt in a single dessert is probably a misprint; a quarter teaspoon is the more usual figure in puddings of this type. Season to taste at the end rather than following the number.
- Lowney's chocolateThe instruction to melt the chocolate points to unsweetened cake chocolate rather than cocoa powder or eating chocolate, though the company sold cocoa too. Substitute unsweetened baking chocolate; if you use cocoa, you lose the cocoa butter and the pudding sets firmer and tastes thinner.
- Melting and the hot waterTwo tablespoons of boiling water worked into the melted chocolate makes a smooth paste that disperses into the custard without seizing into flecks. Add the water gradually and stir it to a glossy emulsion before it goes anywhere near the milk.
- The hinge: cook the cornstarch outCornstarch does not reach full thickening power until it is close to boiling, and a double boiler struggles to get there. Hold it over hard-simmering water and keep it going several minutes past the first sign of thickening, or the pudding will taste chalky and slacken as it cools.
- Egg yolksYolks begin to thicken around 150F and are set by about 160F, so temper them with a little of the warm milk before they join the pan and stir without stopping. If the mixture looks grainy, push it through a fine sieve while hot.
- Chocolate goes in lastThe recipe adds the chocolate paste, vanilla and salt after the mixture has thickened; take the pan off the heat first. Adding chocolate early makes it easier to scorch on the bottom and harder to judge when the starch has cooked.
- Yield and servingThe reconstructed proportions suggested above would give about four small custard-cup servings; the page itself gives no quantities. Chill covered with plastic pressed to the surface, or a skin forms.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by food companies to teach households what to do with a branded product. Chocolate cornstarch puddings like this one are the domestic descendant of blancmange, an older dish thickened with isinglass, arrowroot or ground almonds; cheap refined cornstarch, widely available from the 1840s onward, put a set milk dessert within reach of any kitchen with a double boiler.