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Chocolate (Cup sugar cup water)
1 cup sugar cup water 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Cook all the ingredients except vanilla 12 minutes; add vanilla, and serve hot. This sauce is especially good served with vanilla ice cream, but is good with any gelatine dessert.
This is a hot chocolate sauce, but the transcription has lost some of the quantities that the original page carried — including, awkwardly, the chocolate itself. Read the notes below before you start measuring.
- The missing chocolateThe recipe is titled Chocolate and appears in a book published to sell chocolate, yet no chocolate appears in the ingredient line as printed here. The amount intended on this page cannot be recovered from the text, so treat it as unknown rather than guessing from the title.
- "cup water"The fraction before "cup water" has dropped out. A cup of sugar cooked twelve minutes with a full cup of water gives a thin syrup; half a cup or less gives the thick pouring sauce the serving note implies. This is genuinely ambiguous as transcribed.
- The saltA teaspoon of salt in a cup of sugar would be assertively savoury. A sweet sauce of this size would more usually take a small pinch, and the printed "1" may well be a lost fraction, as appears to have happened with the water.
- Twelve minutes means a boilThe recipe says only to cook the mixture twelve minutes, but that is a sugar-syrup timing rather than a gentle warming. A steady boil for that long should concentrate the syrup enough to thicken as it cools; less and it is likely to run thin over ice cream, longer and it may set firm in the dish.
- Butter and vanilla go in cold and lastVanilla goes in last -- The recipe cooks everything but the vanilla, which is stirred in at the end; extended boiling drives off the aromatics. The butter, by contrast, goes in at the start with the sugar and water.
- Yield and servingA cup of sugar with butter and liquid makes roughly a cup of finished sauce, enough for four to six servings of ice cream. It is meant to be served hot over something cold, which is the whole point of the contrast.
- If it sugarsChocolate syrups of this construction crystallise readily on standing. Reheating gently with a spoonful of water and stirring until smooth generally brings it back; scraping crystals from the pan sides into the syrup while it boils is what causes the problem in the first place.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in the first decade of the twentieth century by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the large American chocolate manufacturers of the period. Books of this kind were advertising in the shape of a cookbook: the recipes are sound and the chapters comprehensive, but chocolate and cocoa appear at every turn, and the brand name sits on the spine. Hot chocolate sauce over vanilla ice cream was a natural showcase — soda fountains had already made the pairing familiar to American eaters by 1900, and a manufacturer who could persuade households to keep cake chocolate on the shelf for the purpose stood to gain. The instruction to serve it with "any gelatine dessert" places the recipe firmly in its moment, when packaged gelatine was newly cheap and moulded desserts were the mark of an up-to-date table.