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Hot Chocolate Sauce
1½ cups sugar
4 squares unsweetened choco- ½ cup water
¼ cup rich milk or water
½ teaspoon vanilla late
Let sugar and water boil in a saucepan for five minutes. Cool melted partly and gradually stir in the chocolate which has been double boiler or in over hot water. Add the vanilla. Place in a double boiler or in a pan over hot water until ready to serve. At the last moment, instead add the milk. (If to be used with ice-cream, use water of milk.)
A straightforward cooked chocolate sauce: sugar syrup, melted unsweetened chocolate, a little liquid at the end. The whole thing takes under fifteen minutes and holds well over hot water.
- What you need1½ cups sugar, ½ cup water, 4 squares unsweetened chocolate, ¼ cup rich milk or water, ½ teaspoon vanilla. "Squares" are 1 oz each, so 4 oz total — modern baking bars are usually 4 oz scored into ounce squares.
- Rich milkThis generally means whole milk, or milk with cream added, rather than evaporated milk. Half-and-half is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Boil the syrup, then cool itFive minutes of boiling concentrates the syrup somewhat, though how far depends on your pan and heat; the recipe gives no temperature. Letting it cool partly before the chocolate goes in is the hinge: chocolate stirred into very hot syrup can turn grainy. Give it a few minutes off the heat, then add the melted chocolate gradually.
- Melting the chocolateUnsweetened chocolate scorches easily. Use a double boiler or a bowl over barely simmering water, and keep water and steam out of the bowl.
- The final liquidThe milk or water goes in at the last moment, off direct heat, to thin the sauce to pouring consistency. Added early and held hot, milk can catch and give the sauce a cooked taste.
- Water for ice creamThe parenthetical advises water rather than milk when the sauce is served over ice-cream.
- Holding and yieldOver hot water it stays pourable while you hold it, and it stiffens considerably as it cools. The recipe gives no yield. Refrigerated, it will set firm and needs rewarming over hot water, with a spoonful of liquid stirred in.
Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household books aimed at the middle-class woman running a kitchen without staff, and a chapter of pudding sauces was a common feature of such volumes. Boiled puddings, cottage puddings, cornstarch moulds and plain cakes were the everyday desserts, and the sauce did the work of making them interesting — hard sauce, lemon sauce, foamy sauce, and this one. Unsweetened baking chocolate in one-ounce squares had been sold in the United States since the nineteenth century and is generally taken to have been the usual chocolate of the American kitchen well into the twentieth; recipes of this period assume it, with the sugar counted separately, which is why the sugar here looks so heavy against the chocolate. The double instruction — milk for pudding, water for ice cream — reflects a household that expected to use one sauce recipe two ways.