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Chocolate Sauce II
1 square unsweetened chocolate 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup sugar 1/3 cup boiling water ½ teaspoon vanilla Melt chocolate; add butter, and pour on gradually water. Bring to boiling-point, add sugar, and let boil five minutes, cool slightly, and add vanilla.
A three-minute sauce that behaves like a soft caramel: the five-minute boil is what sets its final thickness, and it is the only step with any margin for error.
- A square of chocolateIn Farmer's day a "square" was one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate; modern bars are often scored into half-ounce squares, so check the wrapper weight. Use genuine unsweetened chocolate, not a 70% dark bar, which already carries sugar and would throw the balance off.
- Watch the boil, not the clockFive minutes at a full boil in a small heavy pan concentrates the syrup enough that the sauce thickens noticeably as it cools. If your burner runs hot or the pan is wide, check earlier; a syrup boiled too far turns hard and grainy on cold ice cream.
- Add the water graduallyThe instruction is not decorative. Pour the boiling water in a thin stream, stirring, until the mixture is smooth, then bring it up to the boil.
- Guard against crystallizingA plain sugar-and-water syrup with no acid or corn syrup can turn sandy. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone, and wipe stray crystals from the pan sides with a wet brush.
- Vanilla off the heatAdding it after the sauce has cooled slightly, as written, keeps the flavor from boiling away; extract is volatile in a hot syrup.
- Yield and servingServe warm; it stiffens considerably in the refrigerator and needs gentle reheating with a spoonful of water to pour again.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives more than one chocolate sauce. Unsweetened baking chocolate in scored one-ounce cakes was by then a familiar grocery item in New England, where the Dorchester mill founded in 1765 by John Hannon with James Baker had been grinding cacao, and Farmer's recipes assume the reader has a cake of it on the shelf. This version is essentially a chocolate-flavored sugar syrup enriched with butter, distinct from the cream- or milk-based fudge sauces that later became standard.