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Pudding Sauces (Double boiler melt chocolate)
double boiler; melt chocolate over hot water, add four tablespoons sugar and hot water, stir until smooth, then add to cooked mixture; beat whites of eggs until stiff, add gradually powdered sugar and continue beating, then add unbeaten yolks, and stir into cooked mixture; cook one minute, add vanilla, and cool before serving.
This is a fragment of a longer pudding-sauce entry, and it reads as one: the quantities for the chocolate, the milk or cream base, the eggs and the vanilla all belong to lines that are missing. What survives is the method, which is worth reading as a technique rather than as a formula to follow.
- What is missingThe text gives a quantity only for the sugar (four tablespoons). The amount of chocolate, the composition of the "cooked mixture," the number of eggs and the measure of vanilla are all absent. It should be read as the working half of a chocolate custard sauce; the proportions cannot be recovered from what survives.
- "Double boiler"A nested pair of pans with simmering, not boiling, water beneath. The point is that chocolate and egg both scorch and curdle at direct-heat temperatures; a heatproof bowl over a saucepan does the same job.
- The chocolateThis means unsweetened cake chocolate, sold in blocks. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct equivalent. Semisweet or chips will make the sauce cloying, since sugar is added separately.
- Melt, then loosen with hot waterThe sugar and hot water added to the melted chocolate are there to make a smooth syrup before it meets the milk base. Add the water hot and stir hard; cold liquid or a stingy trickle will make the chocolate stiffen into a grainy paste.
- Powdered sugarPeriod powdered sugar is finely ground granulated, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match and dissolves into the beaten whites without chalkiness.
- The egg stepBeating the whites stiff with sugar first, then folding the raw yolks through, gives a lighter, foamier sauce than a straight custard. It also means the eggs go in cold into hot liquid, so add a ladle of the hot mixture to the eggs first and return the lot to the pan, or the whites will set in threads.
- "Cook one minute"Long enough to thicken slightly, not long enough to guarantee that the eggs reach a safe temperature. Cook to 160F on an instant-read thermometer, which will take two to three minutes over simmering water and still leave the sauce pourable.
- Cooling and yieldThe sauce thickens noticeably as it cools and will skin over; press plastic wrap to the surface or stir it once or twice while it comes down. It is a sauce for cottage pudding, steamed pudding or plain cake; with the quantities missing, the yield cannot be stated.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes several pages to pudding sauces because the puddings themselves were deliberately plain: cornstarch, tapioca, bread and steamed batter puddings were cheap, and the sauce was where the interest and the expense went. Chocolate had become an everyday grocery item in New England by the 1890s, much of it from Walter Baker & Company at Dorchester, within the city of Boston, whose unsweetened cakes are what a Boston cook of the period would have reached for. The construction here is a cooked, thickened base enriched with beaten whites and raw yolks at the last moment. That the entry survives only as a method, with its ingredient list severed, is a fair reminder that these books were reference works for cooks who already knew the proportions.