Home › Hot Puddings › Chocolate Sauce
Chocolate Sauce
2 cups milk. 1½ tablespoons corn-starch 2 squares unsweetened chocolate 2 tablespoons hot water 2 eggs 2/3 cup powdered sugar 4 tablespoons powdered sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla Scald one and three-fourths cups milk, add corn-starch diluted with remaining milk, and cook eight minutes in
A cooked custard-and-cornstarch sauce, thick enough to spoon over a steamed or baked pudding. A few of the old terms need translating before you start.
- "Squares" of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for 2 oz. Modern bars are usually scored into 1 oz squares, but check the wrapper weight rather than counting scores.
- Powdered sugarIn cookbooks of this period "powdered sugar" generally meant a fine-grained white sugar rather than the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today. Ordinary granulated sugar is the closest substitute; superfine dissolves faster.
- The milkThe method calls for one and three-fourths cups scalded milk plus a little more to slake the cornstarch, so figure on about 2 cups total. Scalding means heating to just below a simmer, when bubbles rim the pan.
- Slake the starch firstCornstarch stirred straight into hot milk lumps immediately. Whisk it smooth with the reserved cold milk, then pour that slurry into the scalded milk while stirring.
- Cook it in a double boilerThe instruction ends "cook eight minutes in," and a double boiler is the intended vessel; eight minutes of direct heat will scorch the milk. Beat the eggs with the sugar and temper them with a little of the hot mixture before they go in.
- Vanilla goes in lastAdd the teaspoon of vanilla off the heat. Its aroma is volatile and boils away if it is stirred in early.
- Consistency and yieldConsistency -- The sauce thickens further as it cools; thin it with a spoonful of hot milk if it sets too stiff to pour.
Pudding sauces of this kind were the workhorses of a late-Victorian dessert course, where a plain steamed or cottage pudding was made interesting by whatever was poured over it. This one belongs to the cornstarch-thickened family that spread through American cookbooks after refined corn starch became a cheap grocery staple in the second half of the nineteenth century; starch did much of the thickening work that would otherwise have fallen to eggs alone. Unsweetened chocolate in one-ounce cakes was the standard household form long before chocolate chips or couverture, which is why so many recipes of the period count in "squares" rather than ounces.