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Chocolate Custard
To make a nice sweet in a few minutes can be easily managed if you follow this recipe. Make a custard of rich milk and yolks of eggs, sweeten it with sugar, flavored with vanilla, and if you have a little cream add that also. Then grate down some of the best chocolate, as finely as you can, rub it through coarse muslin so that it is a fine powder. Stir this with your custard, always stirring one way so that no bubbles of air get in. When you have got a thick consistency like rich cream, pour the mixture into paper or china cases, sprinkle over the tops with chopped almonds. There is no cooking required.
The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how to make a stirred custard and needs only the chocolate trick. Quantities are entirely absent, so the ratios below are a working starting point.
- "No cooking required" is misleadingIt means no baking and no water bath, not that the custard is uncooked. A custard of milk and yolks is thickened over gentle heat to about 175F, when it coats the back of a spoon; take it off before it reaches a simmer or the yolks will scramble.
- Working proportionsFor four small cases, use 1 cup whole milk, 4 egg yolks, 2 tablespoons sugar and a splash of cream, with 1 to 1.5 oz chocolate. The mixture should be thick enough to hold a soft shape once chilled, since nothing else sets it.
- "The best chocolate"In 1915 this most likely meant a hard block of plain eating or cooking chocolate, generally less sweet than modern confectionery. Use a 60 to 70 percent dark bar and adjust the sugar down; unsweetened baking chocolate also works and is closer to the older cooking blocks.
- Grating and sievingThe muslin step was probably there because coarse gratings will not dissolve in a custard already off the heat. A microplane gives the same fineness in less time, and chilling the bar first keeps it from smearing.
- Stirring one wayThe direction is folklore, but the intent behind it is sound: fold the chocolate in slowly so you do not whip air into a custard that will be served as a dense cream. Any foam on top will set as a dry skin.
- Paper or china casesThese are the small pleated paper cases or individual custard cups of the period, roughly the size of a modern cupcake liner. Ramekins or espresso cups serve the same purpose; paper alone will soften unless it sits in a mould.
- AlmondsChop and toast them briefly before scattering, and add them just before serving so they stay crisp against the custard.
- Chilling and yieldThe original gives no resting time; two to three hours in the refrigerator, covered, brings it to the intended consistency. The proportions above make four small servings.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and the book was sold in aid of them; its tone throughout is one of thrift and improvisation, which explains the vagueness here about quantities and the emphasis on speed. A no-bake chocolate cream was a sensible thing for a displaced cook to know, needing only a pan, a grater and a scrap of muslin.