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Chocolate Sauce (Scald one pint milk in double)
Scald one pint milk in double boiler.
Add one tablespoonful corn starch mixed with one-half tablespoonful flour and few grains salt dissolved in cold milk, and cook over hot water ten minutes.
Melt one and one-half squares chocolate, add one-quarter cup sugar, stir until smooth and add to thickened milk. Beat whites two eggs until stiff, add one-half cup sugar and yolks two eggs mixed, not beaten, together, and pour hot mixture slowly into egg mixture. Turn back into boiler, let stand over hot water, but not cook, for a minute or two. Add one teaspoon vanilla. Cool before serving.
A foamy, custard-based chocolate sauce rather than a glossy ganache — the beaten whites are what give it body. A few of the terms need translating.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for 1.5 oz. Modern bar chocolate is usually sweetened; if you substitute semisweet, cut the sugar back or the sauce will be cloying.
- Corn starch and flourDissolve both the cornstarch and the flour in a few tablespoons of cold milk before adding, as the recipe directs, or you will get lumps. Combining a little flour with cornstarch is common in recipes of this period; the recipe itself gives no reason for it.
- ScaldingScalded milk is heated to about 180F, when it steams and shows a ring of small bubbles at the edge, not a rolling boil. In a double boiler over simmering water it will get there without scorching.
- The hinge: do not boil after the eggsThe whole point of "let stand over hot water, but not cook" is that boiled egg yolk curdles and the sauce turns grainy. Keep the water below a simmer. Note that the recipe as written does not bring the eggs to a temperature that would make them safe, and 170F is at the edge of where the custard will curdle, not well short of it.
- Yolks mixed, not beatenThe direction that the yolks be "mixed, not beaten" most likely means they are stirred in without whipping, which would help preserve the air already in the whites. The finished sauce should be light and slightly frothy on the spoon.
- TemperingPour the hot thickened milk into the egg mixture in a thin stream, whisking constantly, as the recipe's "pour hot mixture slowly" directs. Adding it all at once risks scrambling the yolks.
- Vanilla lastAdded off the heat, as written, because vanilla's aromatics are volatile and cook off. One teaspoon of extract is right for this quantity.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly two and a half cups — enough to spoon over cottage pudding, steamed pudding, plain cake or ice cream. It thickens further as it cools.
Chocolate sauces of this type — milk thickened with starch, then lightened with eggs — belong to the late nineteenth-century American cooking-school tradition, and the phrasing here (scald in a double boiler, squares of chocolate, few grains salt) closely resembles that of the Boston Cooking School books and the many volumes that imitated them. A sauce like this one, spoonable over half a dozen plain desserts, would stretch a limited repertoire. Unsweetened baking chocolate in one-ounce squares was the usual form in which chocolate was sold to home cooks for cooking at this date, with the sugar left to the recipe.