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Chocolate Custard Meringue
2 quarts of rich milk. 3/4 pound of sugar. 3 ounces common chocolate grated. 16 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls of vanilla extract.
Boil the sugar and graved chocolate in half the milk and beat till the chocolate is well dissolved. Separate the eggs so as to get ten or twelve whites for the meringue. Beat the rest of the eggs and yolks into the remaining quart of cold milk, pour the chocolate milk into it; flavor, bake in a four quart milk-pan or dish about twenty minutes. Custards are curdled and made watery by too long baking. As soon as fairly set in the middle have the meringue made as directed in many previous cases, ready to spread over the top while still hot and baking. Sift sugar over it and bake about ten minutes with the oven door open. To be eaten cold. A very handsome and excellent dish when carefully baked.
The above may be cooked and served in custard cups as well. The annexed directions for this will apply equally to several succeeding varieties.
A large baked chocolate custard finished with a meringue lid — a banquet-scale dish that scales down cleanly. The hinge is temperature: the author's warning that "custards are curdled and made watery by too long baking" is the whole technique.
- The egg arithmeticSixteen eggs, of which ten to twelve whites go to the meringue; the custard gets the remaining four to six whole eggs plus the ten or twelve leftover yolks. Eggs of the period are generally thought to have run somewhat smaller than today's large egg, so with modern eggs the lower end of every count is the safer choice.
- Common chocolate'Common chocolate' in this period most likely means a plain, unsweetened cake chocolate rather than sweetened eating chocolate. Use 3 oz unsweetened baking chocolate; if you substitute semisweet, cut the 3/4 lb (about 1 3/4 cups) sugar back by a third.
- Temper, don't scrambleThe chocolate milk is added to a full quart of cold milk holding the eggs, which is the recipe's built-in tempering step. Pour it in a thin stream while whisking, then strain the mixture before it goes into the dish.
- Oven temperatureNothing hotter than 325F, and a water bath is worth the trouble at this volume. The custard is done when the outer inch is set and the center still trembles — around 170-175F on a thermometer. The recipe's twenty minutes assumes the wide, shallow milk-pan it names; a deeper dish will take considerably longer.
- The four-quart milk-panA wide, fairly shallow tinned pan. A 9x13 baking dish or a large gratin dish is the closest modern equivalent; depth is what drives the baking time, so avoid anything narrow and deep.
- Meringue proportionsFor ten to twelve whites, allow about 2 tablespoons of sugar per white, beaten in gradually to soft-glossy peaks. Spread it on the custard while both meringue and custard are hot — cold meringue on cold custard weeps.
- The open oven doorAn old trick for drying and coloring meringue without cooking the custard further. In a modern oven, reduce to 300F and leave the door ajar, or brown it briefly under a broiler watched constantly.
- Yield and servingTwo quarts of milk plus sixteen eggs feeds twelve to sixteen. It must be served cold, as the text says — the custard firms as it chills, and the meringue slices cleanly only once set. Refrigerate rather than leaving it out to cool for hours.
Baked custards thickened with whole eggs and crowned with a sweetened meringue were standard at the elaborate end of nineteenth-century American dessert cookery, and such recipes are often given in banquet quantities; this one adds that the same mixture may be cooked and served in custard cups. Chocolate was still sold largely as unsweetened cakes to be grated, which is why the recipe boils it with sugar in milk rather than melting it: grating and prolonged whisking were how you got coarse, minimally conched chocolate to disperse, before Dutch-process cocoa powder and fine-ground couverture were widely available in American kitchens. The author's note that the directions "will apply equally to several succeeding varieties" is characteristic of the genre, where one master custard was flavored a dozen ways over the following pages.