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Chocolate Sauce
1 cup white sugar. 1 1/2 cups rich milk or cream. 1/4 cake chocolate. 1 teaspoon butter if you use milk without cream.
Put milk, sugar and chocolate in double boiler. Cook until smooth. Flavor with vanilla.
A plain stovetop chocolate sauce with no starch and no eggs — it thickens only by reducing and by the cocoa butter emulsifying, so the finished texture depends almost entirely on how long you keep it over the water.
- "1/4 cake chocolate"Baking chocolate of this period was commonly sold in half-pound cakes scored into eight squares, which would make a quarter cake about 2 oz; other cake sizes were also sold, so treat this as an estimate. It was normally unsweetened, which would account for the full cup of sugar.
- Chop or grate it firstA 2 oz block dropped whole into warm milk will sit there while the milk scalds around it. Grating or chopping it lets it disperse before the sugar starts to draw on it.
- "Rich milk"Milk of the period was not standardized to a fixed fat content as today's whole milk is, and was often richer. Use whole milk with the teaspoon of butter as directed, or half milk and half cream and skip the butter.
- The double boiler is the pointMilk, sugar and chocolate over direct heat will scorch at the bottom and the sugar will catch. Keep the water below the upper pan simmering, not boiling, and stir until no grit remains on the spoon.
- Cooking time"Cook until smooth" gives no time; over simmering water expect roughly ten minutes or more, judged by eye. It stays pourable and fairly thin while hot and thickens as it cools, so judge consistency after a spoonful has cooled on a saucer.
- Vanilla goes in off the heatThe recipe gives no quantity; a teaspoon is a reasonable amount for this volume. Adding it once the pan is off the water keeps the flavor from being driven off.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half to a cup and three-quarters — enough sauce for six to eight servings of ice cream, pudding or plain cake.
- StorageRefrigerated it should keep several days and will thicken considerably when cold. Rewarm gently over water rather than in a hot pan, adding a spoonful of milk if it has tightened.
What the recipe itself records is a time when unsweetened baking chocolate in a scored cake had become an ordinary pantry item in American homes — the cook is expected to know what a "cake" of chocolate is and to measure by fractions of one, the way an earlier book might have said a quarter of a loaf of sugar. Mrs. Wilson wrote through the First World War as a household columnist much concerned with using milk and sugar economically, and this sauce is of that mind: no eggs, no cornstarch, no elaborate tempering, just milk and sugar and chocolate held over water until the three become one thing. The double boiler was the standard defense of the era's stovetop, where a coal or early gas range gave a cook far less control over low heat than a modern burner does.