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Chocolate (Tablespoons sugar can)
4 tablespoons sugar 1/2 can condensed milk teaspoon salt Melt chocolate; add sugar, salt, and boiling water in which has been mixed the condensed milk. Boil five minutes. If condensed milk has been sweetened, omit sugar.
The text as printed has lost part of its ingredient list — the quantity of chocolate and the amount of boiling water are both missing, and the salt has no figure in front of it. What survives is enough to show the method: a boiled chocolate syrup of the kind Lowney's put over ice cream and frozen puddings.
- Missing quantitiesThere is no way to recover the original amounts of chocolate and boiling water from this line, so treat the proportions as unknown rather than guessing. Comparable chocolate sauces of the period run about 2 oz chocolate to 1/2 cup water, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- What "chocolate" means hereIn a Lowney's book this is unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in cakes and broken or scraped before melting — not cocoa powder and not chocolate chips. Modern unsweetened baking squares are the direct equivalent, an ounce apiece.
- Condensed vs. evaporatedIn 1907 "condensed milk" was used loosely for both the sweetened kind and the unsweetened concentrate now sold as evaporated milk, which is why the recipe ends by telling you to drop the sugar if yours is sweetened. A standard can today is 14 oz sweetened condensed or 12 oz evaporated.
- The saltAn unqualified "teaspoon" of salt would swamp a small sauce; period chocolate recipes commonly call for a saltspoon, or 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon, and a figure has probably dropped out of the printed line.
- Five minutes of boilingThe boil concentrates and thickens the syrup. Stir the whole time and keep the heat moderate — a mixture carrying milk solids scorches on the bottom of the pan quickly, and sweetened condensed milk scorches faster still.
- Order of operationsThe recipe has you mix the condensed milk into the boiling water first, and add that to the melted chocolate rather than the reverse.
- ServingThis is a sauce, to be poured warm over ice cream or a frozen pudding.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, belongs to the great age of the manufacturer's cookbook — a chocolate firm publishing several hundred recipes, a good share of them requiring chocolate, and all of them assuming you would buy its cakes rather than a rival's. Sauces like this one sit at the junction of two industrial products that had only recently become household staples: cheap eating chocolate and canned condensed milk, the latter popularized in the United States after the Civil War as a shelf-stable substitute for fresh dairy. That the recipe has to pause and tell the cook to omit the sugar if the can is already sweetened shows how unsettled the labeling still was; the clean modern split between sweetened condensed and evaporated milk was a convention the trade was still working out.