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Chocolate Filling
4 ounces chocolate 2 cups sugar 1 cup water To the cold water, add the sugar and boil until it threads slightly. Melt the chocolate and pour the syrup into it slowly, stirring constantly.
A two-ingredient sugar syrup poured into melted chocolate — essentially a soft chocolate glaze rather than a buttercream. The whole recipe turns on how far you cook the syrup.
- "Threads slightly"This is the thread stage, 230–235F on a candy thermometer, when a spoonful drawn up falls in a fine thread rather than in drops. Cooked further you get fudge; stopped short you get a sauce that never sets.
- The chocolateIn an American book of this period, "4 ounces chocolate" means unsweetened baking chocolate, commonly sold in cakes scored into 1-ounce squares, not sweetened bar chocolate or chips. Using sweet chocolate with 2 cups of sugar gives something close to inedible.
- Melt gentlyUse a bowl over barely simmering water, or short bursts in a microwave. Chocolate scorches above about 120F and unsweetened chocolate has no sugar or milk solids to buffer it.
- Pour slowly, and mean itAdding hot syrup all at once seizes the chocolate into a grainy mass. A thin stream with constant stirring emulsifies it; the mixture will look thin at first and thicken as it cools.
- YieldEnough to fill and top one 8- or 9-inch two-layer cake. Spread it while still warm and pourable.
- Texture noteWith no butter, cream or corn syrup, this sets firm and can turn slightly sandy on standing as the sugar recrystallizes. A tablespoon of butter beaten in at the end, or a teaspoon of corn syrup added to the boiling sugar, keeps it glossy — neither is in the original.
- StorageShelf-stable, since it contains nothing perishable. It hardens in the pan; rewarm over hot water to spread again.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American vegetarian and wartime-thrift cookbooks, and its frosting chapter is a reminder that "meatless" in that era meant abstaining from flesh, not from sugar, butter or eggs. A filling built only from boiled sugar syrup and unsweetened chocolate reflects how chocolate was commonly sold then: in unsweetened one-ounce cakes, with the cook supplying the sugar. It also reflects what is generally taken to be the central skill of pre-thermometer confectionery, judging syrup by how it behaves off the spoon — thread, soft ball, hard crack — a vocabulary that ran through nineteenth-century cookery writing and survives on candy thermometers today.