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Orange Chocolate Sauce
3 tablespoons Lowney's Premium Chocolate grated 3 tablespoons butter 3 egg yolks 4 tablespoons sugar 1/4 cup rich milk cup orange juice grated rind of 1 orange Melt chocolate in top of double boiler; add butter, stir until well mixed; add egg yolks, one at a time, sugar, and milk. Cook until thickened, add orange juice and rind, and serve at once.
A cooked egg-yolk sauce in the custard family, thickened over water rather than direct heat. Two things in the original need attention before you start: one measurement is incomplete, and the orange juice goes in last for a reason.
- The missing measurementThe line reads "cup orange juice" with no fraction, almost certainly a typesetting loss. Given 1/4 cup of milk and three yolks, anything approaching a full cup would thin the sauce badly; 1/4 cup is the proportion that fits, but the original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- Lowney's Premium ChocolateThis was the firm's plain unsweetened baking chocolate, not eating chocolate. Three tablespoons grated is roughly three-quarters of an ounce to an ounce. Substituting a sweetened bar will make the sauce cloying against only 4 tablespoons of sugar.
- Rich milkPeriod shorthand for whole milk with the cream still in it, or milk topped up with cream. Half-and-half is the closest modern equivalent.
- Heat controlKeep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer and never let it touch the upper pan. Yolks set from about 150F and scramble not far above; the sauce should coat a spoon, not boil.
- Add the juice off the heatOrange juice is acidic and will encourage the yolks to curdle if it goes in while the pan is still on the burner. Pull the top pan off, then stir in juice and rind.
- Serve at once means itThere is no starch here, so the sauce firms as it cools and skins over. Hold it briefly over warm (not simmering) water with a lid if you must, and whisk before serving.
- ZestGrate only the coloured layer. Any white pith carried in turns the sauce bitter, which the small amount of sugar cannot mask.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to sauce four to six servings of steamed pudding, sponge cake or poached pears.
Lowney's Cook Book came out of the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the large American chocolate manufacturers of the turn of the twentieth century, and like Baker's promotional cookbooks of the same era it exists to put the firm's chocolate into as many household dishes as possible. That accounts for the specificity of "Lowney's Premium Chocolate" in the ingredient line, a house brand of plain unsweetened cake chocolate. The sauce itself is a cooked egg-yolk custard sauce given a chocolate base, and the pairing of chocolate with orange was already established in confectionery by this date. What dates the recipe is its role: American desserts of the period leaned heavily on steamed and boiled puddings, plain cakes and blancmanges, all of which arrived at the table needing something poured over them.