Home › Puddings and Pudding Sauces › Hot Chocolate Sauce
Hot Chocolate Sauce
One-half cup each of sugar and water. Let boil in a saucepan for five minutes. Allow this syrup to cool partially and then stir in gradually, four ounces of unsweetened chocolate melted over hot water. Add one-half teaspoon of vanilla. Place in a double boiler, or in a pan over hot water, until ready to serve. At last moment add one-half cup of rich milk. (If to be used with ice cream, substitute water for the milk.) Serve with vanilla ice cream, or with blanc mange or baked custard.
A plain sugar-syrup chocolate sauce that behaves like a loose hot fudge. The only real difficulty is temperature control when the chocolate meets the syrup.
- Cool the syrup firstThis is the hinge. Half a cup each of sugar and water boiled five minutes leaves a hot syrup; added to melted chocolate while near boiling it can turn the mixture grainy. Let it cool until warm but no longer steaming, as the recipe directs, before stirring in the chocolate gradually.
- Unsweetened chocolateFour ounces means four squares of the old baking-chocolate bars, or 4 oz of any modern 100% cacao baking chocolate, chopped. Substituting bittersweet or semisweet will make the sauce cloying, since the syrup is already carrying all the sugar.
- "Rich milk"Before standardized dairy, this meant unskimmed milk or milk with some cream in it. Half-and-half is the closest match; whole milk works and gives a slightly thinner sauce.
- Why water for ice creamThe recipe gives no reason for the substitution; it simply directs that water replace the milk when the sauce is served over ice cream.
- Holding itA double boiler over barely simmering water, not a boil -- direct heat scorches the chocolate solids and the sugar. Stir in the milk or water only at the moment of serving, as the recipe says; held hot with the dairy in, it will thicken and can take on a cooked taste.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings. Leftovers can be refrigerated for a few days and reheated over hot water with a spoonful of liquid stirred in.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator -- part of a wave of household manuals issued by magazine and pattern publishers to women already buying their sewing goods. Sauces like this one depended on a specific industrial product: the solid cake of unsweetened chocolate, ground and moulded, which American manufacturers had been selling since the late eighteenth century and which by 1900 was a standard pantry item sold in squares. Because it carried no sugar, the cook supplied her own. The suggested partners, blanc mange and baked custard, place it in the pudding chapter of its day, when moulded starch and egg puddings were common household desserts and a hot sauce was what dressed them up.