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Chocolate Powder (Teaspoon salt cup finely)
1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup finely chopped almonds 5 egg whites Melt butter; add flour, chocolate, salt and milk; cook five minutes. Beat egg yolks until lemon-colored and thick; add sugar and almonds; when well blended, add chocolate mixture, and cut and fold in the beaten whites. Pour into a buttered mold, and steam one hour. Serve immediately with sugar and cream. 2 cups flour 2 tablespoons lard
The text as printed here has been badly scrambled in transcription: the ingredient list is truncated at the top, and the "2 cups flour, 2 tablespoons lard" trailing at the end plainly belongs to the next recipe in the book, most likely a pastry. What survives is a recognisable steamed chocolate pudding built on a thick roux base, and the method is complete enough to follow if you supply sensible quantities.
- The ingredient list is incompleteButter, flour, chocolate, milk, egg yolks and sugar are all called for in the method but have no measurements in the surviving text. Only the salt (1 teaspoon) and the egg whites (5) are legible; the almond line reads "cup finely chopped almonds", so even that measure has probably lost a fraction. Any amounts you use are reconstruction, not the original recipe.
- "Chocolate" here means unsweetenedLowney's sold baking chocolate in cakes, and the sugar in this pudding is added separately with the almonds. Use unsweetened chocolate, not chips or eating chocolate, or the pudding will be cloying.
- Five minutes of cooking is for the flourThe butter-flour-chocolate-milk stage is a thick flour-thickened base. Giving it the full five minutes is what removes the raw-flour taste and sets the starch; the recipe does not specify the heat, but rushing this stage leaves a pasty edge that steaming will not fix.
- Temper before foldingThe recipe does not say to cool the chocolate base, but letting it come down to warm rather than hot before it meets the yolk-sugar mixture avoids scrambling the yolks, and the whites go in last with a cutting-and-folding motion. Nothing in the surviving text calls for chemical leavening, so the whites are doing the lifting.
- Buttered mold means well butteredButter the mold heavily and fill it no more than two-thirds; the pudding rises. Cover it with a lid, or with buttered parchment and foil tied down, so condensation does not fall back into the batter.
- Steaming, not bakingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full hour, topping up with boiling water as needed. A hard boil bounces the mold and coarsens the texture.
- "Serve immediately"Steamed puddings collapse and firm up as they cool. Unmold after five minutes' rest and take it to the table at once, with sugar and cream as directed; a thin pouring cream suits it better than whipped.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the American chocolate makers in the promotional cookbook trade; the point of such books was to put a firm's baking chocolate into as many pages of a household's repertoire as possible. A steamed chocolate pudding thickened with a flour-and-butter base and lightened with beaten whites sits squarely in that tradition, borrowing its structure from the English boiled and steamed puddings that dominated nineteenth-century dessert courses and simply swapping chocolate in for suet, currants or lemon. The almonds point the same way: ground and chopped nuts were a familiar source of richness, and a mold set over simmering water needed no oven at all. The mangled state of this particular page is itself a period artifact of a sort, showing how easily the ingredient lists of early twentieth-century cookbooks come apart in transcription.