Home › Desserts › Chocolate Sauce (Egg yolks cup sugar teaspoon)
Chocolate Sauce (Egg yolks cup sugar teaspoon)
2 egg yolks 4 cup sugar teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon butter 2 ounces Lowney's Premium Chocolate or 1 cup Lowney's Cocoa Cook all ingredients in double boiler, stirring constantly until the spoon is coated. Serve hot or cold. 3 egg whites
A stirred chocolate custard sauce for puddings, ice cream and plain cake. It is thickened by egg yolk alone, so the heat control matters more than anything else in the method.
- The hinge: coat the spoon, then stop"Stirring constantly until the spoon is coated" means the custard has reached roughly 175-180F, at which point it will leave a clean track when you draw a finger across the back of the spoon. Past about 185F the yolks curdle; pull the pan off the heat and strain the moment it thickens.
- Liquid is requiredLiquid appears to be missing -- The ingredient list gives no milk or cream, and yolks and sugar cooked alone would scramble rather than form a sauce, so a line has probably dropped out of the text. Roughly a cup of milk or light cream, warmed and whisked into the beaten yolks and sugar before the mixture goes over the water, is a reasonable working guess, but the original quantity is unknown.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe sugar and salt amounts as printed have lost their fractions, and the '1 cup' of cocoa sits oddly beside 2 ounces of chocolate. Reading the sugar as about 1/4 cup (3/4 is equally possible), the salt as a pinch, and the cocoa as roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup in place of the chocolate is guesswork rather than a recovered reading.
- Premium ChocolateLowney's Premium was unsweetened baking chocolate, equivalent to two 1-ounce squares today. Chop it fine so it melts before the eggs have a chance to set.
- Cocoa needs no substitutionCocoa -- Lowney's Cocoa was an unsweetened cocoa powder, not a sweetened drinking mix; whether it was natural or alkalised is not something the book states. Any unsweetened cocoa powder works; sift it with the sugar to avoid lumps in the finished sauce.
- Double boilerUse a heatproof bowl over barely simmering water, with the base clear of the water. Direct heat is possible but leaves no margin for error with a yolk-only thickener.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on how much liquid is added and cannot be fixed from the text as printed. Refrigerate with a sheet of plastic against the surface; it thickens considerably when cold and can be loosened with a spoonful of warm milk.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Hershey's, put out recipe collections to encourage domestic use of its products. Sauces of this kind sit at the meeting point of two traditions: the French crerne anglaise, a milk-and-yolk custard stirred over water, and the American enthusiasm for chocolate on ice cream and steamed puddings that grew through the 1890s and 1900s. The offer of either bar chocolate or cocoa in the same recipe is characteristic of these company books, which were as much catalogues as cookbooks and wanted a home for whichever tin or cake the reader had bought.