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Chocolate Cream Sauce
teaspoon salt cup powdered sugar 1 cup cream 4 tablespoons hot water cup Lowney's Premium Chocolate grated 1 egg white 1 teaspoon almond extract, or 1 tablespoon cordial Melt chocolate; add sugar and boiling water; cook until glossy. Cool. Beat cream until stiff; add chocolate mixture gradually; cut and fold in beaten white. Flavor and serve. One half cup Lowney's Cocoa may be substituted for the chocolate.
An uncooked chocolate sauce built on whipped cream rather than butter or eggs, thickened only by aeration. The one thing to get right is temperature: the chocolate syrup must be fully cold before it meets the cream, or the cream deflates into a thin brown liquid.
- Missing quantitiesThe amounts for the salt, the powdered sugar and the grated chocolate have lost their fractions in this text. Comparable sauces of the period use about 1/8 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup powdered sugar and 1/4 cup grated unsweetened chocolate; treat those as reconstructions, not as the book's own figures.
- Water amountThe ingredient line calls for 4 tablespoons hot water while the method says boiling water. Bring the water to a boil and measure it hot, then cook the syrup gently until it looks glossy, as directed.
- The chocolateLowney's Premium was plain unsweetened chocolate, the equivalent of modern baking chocolate. Grating it, as directed, is still the fastest way to get it to melt evenly in a small quantity. Do not substitute semisweet or the sauce will be cloying.
- Cocoa substitutionIf you use the half cup of cocoa instead, use unsweetened natural or Dutch-process powder and whisk it into the hot syrup rather than melting it. Cocoa absorbs more liquid, so expect a stiffer paste that needs a little extra water to loosen before it goes into the cream.
- Cool completely"Cool" means to room temperature or slightly below; spreading the syrup thin on a plate speeds this. Warm syrup will melt the whipped cream on contact.
- CreamUse heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or above; modern light cream will not stiffen. Beat only to soft-firm peaks, since folding in the chocolate stiffens it further.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is folded in and never cooked. Use a pasteurized egg white, or in-shell pasteurized eggs, if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- FlavoringA teaspoon of almond extract is assertive by modern standards; start with half. The "cordial" alternative would have been a sweet liqueur such as maraschino, curaçao or crème de cacao.
- Yield and servingRoughly two to three cups depending on how far the cream is whipped, enough for six to eight servings over plain cake, poached pears, or ice cream. It is best used soon after making, as it will begin to weep; fold it briefly with a spatula before serving.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that ran on the same logic as Baker's, Hershey's and the flour and gelatine firms of the era: give the housekeeper a whole book of recipes and every one of them names your product. That is why the chocolate here is specified by brand and why the closing line offers a cocoa substitution at an exact half cup, since Lowney's sold both. The sauce itself belongs to a moment when mechanical egg beaters had made whipped-cream desserts a matter of a few minutes' work rather than an hour with a bundle of twigs, and books of the 1900s are thick with sauces, "creams" and mousses that depend on nothing but air, alongside the older boiled custards and hard sauces. The folded egg white is an older economy still, borrowed from the pastry cook to stretch a small quantity of cream into something that would mound on a spoon.