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Chocolate Filling
5 tablespoons grated chocolate 1 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1 egg 2 teaspoons milk Melt the chocolate; add the sugar, egg and milk and cook for five minutes over boiling water. Cool slightly; add the vanilla and spread between the layers of cake.
A cooked egg-and-sugar chocolate filling, thick enough to hold cake layers apart. The whole thing lives or dies on gentle heat and constant stirring.
- The hinge: stir without stoppingThere is barely a tablespoon of liquid here against a cup of sugar and an egg, so the mixture is a stiff paste rather than a custard. Over direct heat it would scramble and scorch within a minute; keep it in the top of a double boiler, off the water's surface, and stir the whole time.
- "Grated chocolate"In a book of this period this most likely means plain unsweetened baking chocolate, grated from a cake or block. Five tablespoons grated is on the order of 1 to 1.5 oz by weight; use unsweetened chocolate rather than semisweet, since the recipe already carries a full cup of sugar.
- Over boiling waterA double boiler with an inch of simmering water underneath. Five minutes is enough to dissolve the sugar and set the egg, but check with a thermometer: the filling should reach 160F, which also settles any question about the egg.
- Two teaspoons of milk is not a typoTwo teaspoons of milk -- It reads like too little. The egg supplies most of the moisture. If the cooked filling is too stiff to spread, loosen it a teaspoon of milk at a time while it is still warm rather than adding more at the start.
- Vanilla lastAdded after cooking, as directed, because alcohol-based extract flashes off over heat. Do not move it earlier in the sequence.
- Spreading temperature"Cool slightly" means warm but no longer hot. Cold, this filling sets firm and tears the crumb; too hot and it soaks in and runs out the sides.
- YieldRoughly three-quarters of a cup, enough to fill between two 8- or 9-inch layers. It is unlikely to stretch to frosting the outside as well.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf era of American cookery publishing, when pages were punched so a cook could add her own and rearrange by section. Fillings occupy their own small territory in the cake chapter, and a layer cake of this period was often built with one preparation between the layers and something different on top. Chocolate appears here in its older household form, a block of unsweetened chocolate grated as needed; pre-sweetened chips and pourable melting chocolate were not yet the default pantry item they later became.