Home › Salads › Chocolate (Cups scalded milk cup sugar)
Chocolate (Cups scalded milk cup sugar)
2 cups scalded milk 1 cup sugar 3 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Soak the gelatine in cold water; mix sugar, chocolate and eggs; add scalded milk, and cook in double boiler until a coating is formed on a spoon; add soaked gelatine; when dissolved, add salt and vanilla; pour into mold and chill. Serve with sugar and cream, beaten cream, or soft custard.
Chocolate Blanc Mange No. 2 cup Irish moss 3 cups cold water 4 cups cold milk 2 squares Lowney's Premium
This is a chocolate blancmange — a gelatine-set custard — and the page as printed has lost both the gelatine and the chocolate from its ingredient list, along with the opening of the recipe that follows it. Read the method rather than the column of figures.
- Missing quantitiesThe instructions call for gelatine and chocolate that never appear in the list; the printed ingredients begin partway through. A custard of this size would take perhaps a tablespoon or two of granulated gelatine and a couple of ounces of chocolate, but any such figure is a guess and is not in the original text.
- Squares of chocolateLowney's Premium was sold in cake form scored into one-ounce squares, so one square equals one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. A cup of sugar tells you the chocolate is unsweetened.
- Soaking the gelatineSheet and granulated gelatine of the period needed a long cold soak to hydrate. Cover it with cold water — a quarter cup or so — and leave it while the custard cooks; it goes into the hot custard off the heat and dissolves in the residual warmth.
- Coats a spoonThis is the hinge. The custard is done at roughly 170-175F, when it films the back of a spoon and a finger drawn through leaves a clear line. Somewhere above about 180-185F the eggs will curdle, and a double boiler with water below a simmer rather than boiling is what keeps it out of trouble.
- Scalded milkHeating the milk to just below boiling was originally about killing off souring organisms in unpasteurised milk. With modern milk it simply shortens the cooking time and helps the chocolate and sugar dissolve smoothly.
- Setting and unmoldingFour hours in the refrigerator, longer for a large mold. Rinse the mold in cold water before filling and dip it briefly in warm water to release. Yield is about a quart, six servings.
- Recipe No. 2The trailing lines belong to a second version thickened with Irish moss (carrageen seaweed) instead of gelatine. Its own method is not on this page — the moss is rinsed, soaked, and simmered in the milk until it thickens, then strained out.
Blancmange began as a medieval European dish of pounded almonds and rice flour, white by definition — the name is literally "white food" — and only in the nineteenth century did the term loosen to mean almost any milk pudding stiffened with gelatine, cornstarch, or Irish moss, chocolate included. This one comes from a cookbook published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer whose books existed to put its own Premium chocolate into American home kitchens; the recipes are competent and the branding is constant. The alternative version using Irish moss points back to the older New England practice of thickening puddings with carrageen gathered off the Atlantic coast, a habit that survived well into the era of commercial powdered gelatine.