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Rich Chocolate Filling
5 egg yolks cup sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch 2 cups milk 3 ounces Lowney's Premium
The page as printed is an ingredient list with the method lost, and one quantity has dropped a fraction in the original type. What is here is a straightforward cornstarch-thickened chocolate pastry cream.
- The missing sugar quantity"cup sugar" has lost its fraction somewhere between the compositor and the page; the original almost certainly read a fractional cup. For five yolks and three ounces of unsweetened chocolate, anything from a half to a full cup is plausible, so this is a judgment call rather than a conversion.
- Lowney's PremiumThis was the Walter M. Lowney Company's unsweetened baking chocolate; cakes of baking chocolate in this period were generally scored into one-ounce squares. Substitute three ounces of plain unsweetened chocolate; semisweet will make the filling sweeter than intended.
- The hinge: temper the yolksWhisk the sugar and cornstarch into the yolks, then pour the hot milk in slowly while whisking, and only then return everything to the pan. Dumping cold yolks into hot milk gives you sweet scrambled egg strained out and lost.
- How far to cook itOnce it comes back to the pan it must reach a bare boil and bubble for a minute or so, whisking constantly. Cornstarch does not reach full thickening power below the boil, and the brief boil also deactivates the yolk enzyme that would otherwise thin the custard as it sits.
- Chocolate timingMelt the chocolate into the milk before thickening, or stir it in off the heat at the end. Either works; adding it off-heat gives a cleaner flavor and less risk of scorching on the pan bottom.
- CoolingPress plastic wrap directly on the surface and chill. Left open it forms a skin, and the filling needs to be cold and set before it will hold between cake layers.
- YieldRoughly two and a half cups, enough to fill a two-layer 8-inch cake, a batch of cream puffs, or a single pie shell.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer that competed with Baker's and Hershey in the early twentieth century, and like other house cookbooks of the period it promotes the firm's goods: its dessert recipes repeatedly call for Lowney's Premium chocolate or Lowney's cocoa by name. Fillings of this type -- yolks, sugar, starch and milk, cooked to a thick cream -- are close kin to the French creme patissiere and were common in American layer cakes by the late nineteenth century, cornstarch being by then a cheap and widely advertised home thickener. How terse the recipe was as originally printed cannot be judged from this page, since the method is missing here.