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Chocolate (Tablespoons milk cup sugar)
3 tablespoons milk cup sugar 2 teaspoons butter 1 egg teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla, or 1 tablespoon wine Melt chocolate, add remaining ingredients except flavoring, and cook in double boiler until it thickens, stirring constantly. Cool and add flavoring.
One cup chopped nuts or one cup shredded cocoanut or one cup mixed fruit may be added to this filling. 1 cup sugar cup water
This is a cooked chocolate filling for layer cakes, of the sort meant to be spread while still soft enough to level. The page has come through transcription with most of its fractions lost, so read the amounts with care before committing.
- The missing chocolateThe title and first line have dropped the chocolate quantity altogether — the recipe as printed here begins mid-list. A filling on this scale would likely have taken a square or two (1–2 oz) of unsweetened chocolate, but the figure is simply not recoverable from this page.
- Fractions lost in the type"cup sugar" and "teaspoon salt" were most likely ½ cup and a small fraction of a teaspoon in the original setting. Do not read them as a full cup and a full teaspoon; a full teaspoon of salt would wreck the filling.
- The stray last line"1 cup sugar cup water" is not part of this filling; it appears to be the beginning of the next recipe on the page.
- Double boiler, and whyThe egg is the main thickener here, so the mixture must stay below a simmer. Water barely trembling underneath, bowl not touching it, and stir without stopping until the filling coats the spoon heavily. Direct heat risks curdling it.
- Melt the chocolate first, aloneThe instruction is deliberate: chocolate melted on its own then let down with milk and sugar behaves; chocolate dropped into a cold egg mixture stays grainy.
- Flavoring after coolingVanilla and wine both lose their aromatics in heat. Stir them in once the filling is warm rather than hot, which is also the point at which it stiffens enough to spread.
- The wine optionThe "wine" of period American dessert recipes was commonly a fortified one such as sherry or Madeira, though this recipe does not specify.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities make only a small amount of filling, and the optional cup of nuts, coconut or fruit will bulk it out while making it harder to spread evenly.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, in the first decade of the twentieth century. Books like it were the standard promotional form of the era: a genuinely useful general cookery volume in which the maker's product turns up wherever it plausibly can, and often where it does not. Fillings such as this one are often taken to belong to the broader movement in American home baking toward the soft cooked fillings and boiled frostings that define the layer cake — an egg-thickened custard base, rather than the confectioner's sugar and butter mixture that would largely replace it later in the century. The choice of vanilla or wine is a small survival of nineteenth-century practice, when sherry and Madeira were as ordinary a flavoring in a dessert as an extract.