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CHOCOLATE FILLING (Take one and one-half squares)
Take one and one-half squares of chocolate and melt over hot water. Add gradually one-third cup of warm cream, the beaten yolk of one egg and one-half teaspoon of melted butter. Flavor with one-half teaspoon of vanilla and stir in sufficient confectioners' sugar to make of a spreading consistency. T
A straightforward chocolate spreading filling of its day, but one that leaves a whole egg yolk essentially uncooked. That single detail decides how it should be treated now.
- The yolk is never cookedChocolate melted over hot water and a third of a cup of merely warm cream will not bring the mixture anywhere near the 160F at which egg is considered safe, and the yolk is stirred in with no return to the heat. Salmonella risk in raw yolk is the reason this one should be left on the page; use a current cooked-custard or ganache filling recipe instead.
- No cooking step at allUnlike a boiled cream filling, nothing here returns to the stove after the egg goes in. There is no stage at which the mixture is held at temperature, which is what a modern recipe would specify.
- A "square" of chocolateOne ounce of baking chocolate, so a square and a half is about 1.5 oz; squares of this period were normally unsweetened, though the recipe does not say so. The sugar is added by feel because the recipe specifies "sufficient... to make of a spreading consistency."
- "Melt over hot water"A double boiler, with the water hot rather than boiling. Melted chocolate can seize if a little water or steam reaches it.
- Sugar to consistencyThe original gives no quantity because the amount depends on how thin the cream leaves the mixture, so it has to be judged by eye.
Butterick's cake chapter belongs to the era when a home baker's chocolate came as unsweetened blocks scored into one-ounce squares, and chocolate recipes of the period commonly begin by counting squares rather than weighing. Fillings like this one sat between cooked boiled icings and plain butter-and-sugar frostings: the yolk and the spoonful of butter give richness and a glossy set without the trouble of a sugar syrup and a thermometer. Uncooked egg in frostings, fillings and boiled-dressing shortcuts was entirely routine in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century, and the widespread caution against it is generally traced to the later 1900s, when Salmonella in intact shell eggs came to be recognised as a problem. The recipe is a good marker of that shift: nothing about the method was careless by the standards of its own kitchen.