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Chocolate Filling
11/2 squares chocolate 1 cup powdered sugar 3 tablespoons milk 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Melt the chocolate, add one-half of the sugar, and the milk. Stir until smooth. Add the remainder of the sugar and cook over hot water 20 minutes, then add the vanilla. 2 eggs
A double-boiler filling for layer cakes, of a type that appears in nearly every American cookbook of the period. Two things in the text need sorting out before you start: what "powdered sugar" meant, and what the stray eggs are doing at the end.
- The trailing "2 eggs"The eggs are listed with no instruction for using them, and may well be a stray line carried over from a neighbouring recipe in the original columns. Nothing in the method accounts for them; treat the filling as chocolate, sugar, milk and vanilla only.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 1 1/2 squares is 1 1/2 oz, about 42 g. Unsweetened is right here, since the cup of sugar carries all the sweetness.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era "powdered sugar" usually meant a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Either will work, but confectioners' sugar sets firmer and slightly chalkier; superfine granulated gives a glossier filling.
- Cook over hot waterA double boiler, with the water below simmering rather than boiling and the bowl not touching it. Direct heat risks seizing the chocolate and scorching the sugar.
- Twenty minutesThat is a long cook for so little liquid. Stir often and expect the mixture to thicken and darken; if it goes stiff or grainy before time is up, loosen it with milk a teaspoon at a time rather than pushing on.
- Vanilla lastThe recipe adds it only after the twenty-minute cook. Vanilla extract is alcohol-based and its aroma dissipates with prolonged heating, so late addition suits it.
- YieldRoughly three-quarters of a cup, enough to fill between two 8- or 9-inch layers. It spreads best while just warm and firms as it cools.
Fillings of this kind belong to the era when a "layer cake" was assembled at home from plain cake rounds and whatever filling the cook fancied that day. What makes this one recognisably turn-of-the-century is the double boiler: chocolate was by then coming to be sold in convenient one-ounce squares of unsweetened baking chocolate, though just when that became reliable is hard to pin down, and cooks were repeatedly warned that it must be melted gently over water. The long twenty-minute cook drives off moisture until the sugar and chocolate hold together on their own. Community and promotional cookbooks of the period, of which Reliable Recipes is one, tended to print such recipes in tight double columns, which is very likely how two eggs ended up stranded at the foot of this one.