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Chocolate Sauce
1 Square Chocolate 1/2 Cup Boiling Water Cup Corn Syrup (light) 1/2 Cup Sugar 1 Tablespoon Butter Substitute 1/2 Teaspoon Vanilla Melt chocolate over hot water; add butter substitute and blend thoroughly.
While constantly stirring add the boiling water gradually; add sugar and syrup. Boil for about 12 minutes. Cool slightly and flavor with vanilla. Keep warm over hot water.
A straightforward chocolate syrup for puddings and ice cream, but the ingredient list has a gap and the boiling time is long enough to change the sauce's texture.
- The missing quantityThe corn syrup line gives no measure. It may be 1/2 cup, matching the sugar, or 1 cup; the text does not say. Start with 1/2 cup; the sauce can be thinned or sweetened after.
- One square of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard scored block of the period. Bittersweet or semisweet will work but the sauce will be markedly sweeter, so cut the sugar.
- Butter substituteThis means margarine or oleo. Butter is fine and better.
- The twelve minutesThis is the hinge. Twelve minutes at a full rolling boil will concentrate a sugar-and-syrup mixture well past pouring consistency, and the sauce may set very thick when cold. Keep it at a bare simmer and watch the consistency rather than the clock — pull it when it coats a spoon and still runs.
- Adding the waterBoiling water into melted chocolate can seize the mixture if dumped in. A spoonful at a time, stirred smooth before the next, gives an emulsion that stays glossy.
- Vanilla lastCorrect as written and worth respecting: vanilla flavour is volatile and boils away. Off the heat, slightly cooled, is the right moment.
- Yield and keepingRoughly a cup, depending on how far it is boiled down. It holds a week refrigerated in a jar and thickens considerably when cold; warm it over hot water, as the recipe says, rather than over direct heat.
Chocolate sauce built on corn syrup rather than cream or butter alone is a product of the early twentieth-century American pantry, when commercial light corn syrup — sold in tins from the 1900s onward — became a cheap, reliable way to keep a sugar sauce smooth and pourable instead of grainy. The "butter substitute" in the ingredient list is harder to read as a date stamp than it first appears: the phrase turns up in American cookbooks well outside the two war periods, and margarine is often said to have been written into recipes as a matter of thrift, though that is not something a single ingredient line can establish. The instruction to keep the sauce warm over hot water probably reflects a kitchen without a low burner setting, where a pan set in another pan of water would hold anything sweet without scorching it.