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Chocolate (Melt sugar in clean omelet pan)
Melt sugar in clean omelet pan; when golden brown, add to scalded milk; when dissolved pour on to eggs, which have been slightly beaten, add salt, vanilla, and chocolate which has been melted over hot water.
Strain into individual molds. Set in a pan of hot water and bake in a moderate oven until firm. Chill; unmold, and serve with chocolate sauce or caramel sauce. 2 cups light cream
This is a baked chocolate caramel custard, and the method survives intact even though the ingredient list has come down to us truncated — only the cream is listed. Treat the quantities below as a working reconstruction and the technique as the authority.
- The missing ingredient listAs printed, the page gives only "2 cups light cream" — the sugar, eggs, salt, vanilla, chocolate and milk named in the method have no amounts. A standard custard of this era runs about 4 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar for the caramel plus a little for the custard, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon vanilla and 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate to a scant quart of milk and cream. Nothing in the original confirms this.
- Melting sugar dryThe "clean omelet pan" is simply a heavy skillet with nothing stuck to it; dry sugar seizes onto residue and burns. Stir the sugar over medium heat until it liquefies and turns the colour of an old penny, then add it to the scalded milk off the heat — it will hiss and clump, and needs stirring until dissolved.
- Do not cook the eggs twiceThis is the hinge. The caramel-milk must be poured onto the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking; dumped in at once it scrambles them, and no amount of straining recovers a smooth custard. The straining step the recipe calls for is insurance, not a substitute.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is 350F, though baked custards are more forgiving at 325F. The water bath should come halfway up the molds and be hot, not boiling, when the pan goes in.
- When it is firmModern practice is to pull custard slightly before it looks set: the centre should still wobble as a unit when the mold is nudged, roughly 170-175F on an instant-read thermometer. Individual molds take 25-35 minutes. Baked to visibly solid, it weeps and goes grainy.
- The chocolate"Chocolate" here almost certainly means unsweetened baking chocolate rather than chips or cocoa, though this page specifies neither form nor amount. Melted over hot water it stays fluid; direct heat scorches it and turns the custard gritty.
- UnmoldingChill at least four hours, ideally overnight. Run a thin knife around the edge and invert onto the serving plate — a brief dip of the mold base in warm water loosens a stubborn one.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; on the reconstructed quantities above it would fill roughly six half-cup molds. The chocolate sauce or caramel sauce the recipe finishes with is a separate preparation, presumably given elsewhere in the book.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 under the name of Maria Willett Howard, a graduate of the Boston Cooking School, for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston — a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Hershey, found that the surest way to sell cocoa and baking chocolate was to hand American housewives several hundred reasons to buy it. The dish itself is a chocolate variation on the caramel custard family that runs from French crème renversée through the Spanish and Latin American flan, all built on the same trick of cooking sugar dry until it browns and using it to flavour a milk-and-egg custard. Its appearance here in a company cookbook is entirely to the point: the caramel is traditional, the chocolate is the advertisement. The reliance on individual molds set in a pan of hot water also reflects a period when domestic ovens generally had no thermostats, and a water bath was a dependable way to keep a custard from curdling.