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Chocolate Cream Custard
teaspoon vanilla 1 cup sugar 4 eggs 2 ounces Lowney's Premium 3 cups scalded milk 1/2 teaspoon salt
An ingredient list for a baked or stirred chocolate custard from a chocolate company's promotional cookbook. A few of its terms need translating, and the ratios tell you more about method than the wording does.
- Lowney's PremiumThis was the company's unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in cakes that were commonly scored into one-ounce squares. Two ounces of any modern unsweetened baking chocolate stands in directly; do not use semisweet, as the cup of sugar already accounts for all the sweetening.
- Scalded milkBring the milk just to the point where bubbles form at the edge of the pan and steam rises, around 180F, then take it off the heat. Scalding is usually explained as a way of handling raw milk, killing bacteria and deactivating enzymes; with pasteurised milk it survives because hot milk melts the chocolate smoothly and shortens the cooking.
- Melting the chocolateChop or grate the chocolate and stir it into the hot milk until no specks remain before any egg goes near it. Two ounces of solid chocolate dropped into a finished custard will not disperse.
- Tempering the eggsBeat the eggs with the sugar and salt, then add the hot chocolate milk in a thin stream while whisking. Poured the other way round, the eggs scramble.
- DonenessFour whole eggs to three cups of milk is a soft-set custard. The printed ingredient list gives no temperature or time. Stirred on the stove it thickens at 175-180F and must never simmer; baked in a water bath in a moderate oven (around 325F) it is done when the edges are firm and the centre still trembles, typically something like 30 to 45 minutes for individual cups.
- Vanilla quantityThe numeral has been lost from this printing; the unit 'teaspoon' survives, so the original was most likely one teaspoon or a fraction of one. Add it after the custard comes off the heat so the flavour is not driven off.
- YieldAbout one quart, which fills six to eight custard cups. Chill before serving; the texture is best several hours after cooking.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and like the Walter Baker booklets of the same era it existed to put the firm's products into domestic kitchens under the guise of general instruction. That is why the chocolate here is named by brand and grade while the milk and eggs are simply milk and eggs. Boiled and baked custards were a staple of American home dessert cookery at the time, so adding two ounces of unsweetened chocolate to a standard custard base was a short route from a familiar dish to a branded one.