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Chocolate Filling
½ squares chocolate
1 egg-yolk
¼ cup milk
1½ teaspoon butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
Melt the chocolate over hot water, in a double boiler; add the milk, and cook together, stirring until the mixture is thick and creamy. Add sugar and beaten egg-yolk, stir until smooth and cook five minutes. Add the butter. Beat well. Remove from heat and add flavoring. Cool before spreading on cake.
A quick cooked chocolate filling of the boiled-sugar-and-yolk school, thickened by egg and sugar rather than flour. The ingredient list has one clear typographical casualty and one unit that no longer means what it did.
- "½ squares chocolate"Almost certainly a broken fraction for 1½ squares; half a square of chocolate to a cup of brown sugar would barely tint the filling. A square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so read this as about 1½ oz.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar varied more in moisture and refinement than today's packed light brown. Measure it lightly packed; a heavily packed cup will push the filling toward fudge.
- The double boiler is the hingeEverything here happens over hot, not boiling, water. Direct heat scorches the chocolate and scrambles the yolk the moment it goes in, and there is no flour in the mixture to protect it.
- "Thick and creamy" with a quarter cup of milkAn ounce and a half of chocolate in ¼ cup milk thickens quickly into a heavy paste. Do not wait for a pourable custard consistency; it will not come.
- Add the yolk off the direct boilAdding the yolk -- Temper it: stir a spoonful of the hot chocolate mixture into the beaten yolk first, then return everything to the pan.
- Five minutes, and no moreOver gentle heat five minutes is enough to cook out the raw-yolk taste and set the sugar. Cooked longer, the sugar can begin to grain.
- CoolingIt thickens considerably as it cools and spreads best at just below room temperature. If it stiffens past spreading, beat in a teaspoon of hot milk rather than reheating.
- YieldRoughly a cup, which is about enough to fill between two 8- or 9-inch layers.
Cake fillings of this kind were often set apart from frostings in American cookbooks, on the general principle that the filling was cooked and soft while the frosting was beaten and firm. The building block is the "square" of chocolate, the one-ounce cake of unsweetened chocolate sold in wrapped blocks, a familiar household measure by the time Butterick issued this collection. Brown sugar rather than white gives the filling a caramel edge and a slightly grainier set, and it was generally the cheaper sugar in the pantry. Butterick, a pattern company, published household books as an extension of its magazines for home sewers and housekeepers; the recipes throughout run short and plain, and assume a cook who already knows what a double boiler is for.