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Chocolate (Tablespoons sugar eggs cup)
2 tablespoons sugar 2 eggs ½ cup flour 2 cups milk 2 tablespoons hot water 1 cup sugar 1 pint cream ¼ teaspoon salt Beat eggs; add flour, one cup sugar, and milk; cook in double boiler twenty minutes. Melt chocolate; add sugar, boiling water; cook until glossy, then add to egg mixture; cool; add cream, salt, and freeze. 2 cups milk 2 cups cream 1 cup sugar
A flour-thickened chocolate custard frozen in an old-style ice-and-salt freezer. The method is sound; a few of the quantities need judgment before you start.
- The chocolate is not quantifiedThe instructions call for melted chocolate but no amount appears among the ingredients. For a base of this size, 2 to 3 ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate is a reasonable reconstruction; treat it as such rather than as the original figure.
- Salt"4 teaspoon salt" has almost certainly lost its fraction and should be read as ¼ teaspoon. A full four teaspoons would ruin the batch.
- Water for the chocolateThe list says 2 tablespoons hot water, the method says boiling water. Use 2 tablespoons of boiling water, worked into the melted chocolate with the sugar until the paste turns smooth and glossy — that is what keeps the chocolate from seizing into grains in the cold custard.
- Two sugars, two jobsThe 1 cup of sugar goes into the egg-milk-flour custard; the 2 tablespoons go into the chocolate paste. Keep them separate or the chocolate will not come together properly.
- Double boiler, twenty minutesThat is a starch-set custard, not a delicate crème anglaise — the flour protects the eggs, so the long cook is intentional and cooks out the raw flour taste. Stir often and expect it to thicken to a pourable pudding.
- Chill before churning"Cool" means thoroughly cold, ideally overnight in the refrigerator. A warm base churns to coarse ice crystals in any machine.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt. A modern churn does the same work; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and beat it smooth every 30 minutes until set.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts, or eight to ten servings. Let it firm up for a couple of hours after churning before serving.
Walter M. Lowney's Boston chocolate company published its cook book in the same spirit as Baker's and Hershey's did — a free or cheap volume in which nearly every page finds another use for the manufacturer's product. This recipe carries no attribution, so the link to Lowney's is a guess rather than a matter of record. Frozen chocolate custards like this one belong to the era when an ice cream freezer was standard household equipment and commercial ice was cheap and widely delivered, so a family could churn a batch on a summer afternoon without a factory behind them. The flour in the base is characteristic of American home ice creams of the period: starch stretches the eggs, guards against curdling over uneven heat, and gives body that survives the coarse texture of hand-cranked freezing.