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Chocolate-Apple Custard
Peel, core, and cut in quarters a few cooking-apples, put in a pan with a small quantity of water, sweeten and dust in some cinnamon. Cook the apples over the fire until reduced to a pulp. Scrape a pound of chocolate in a saucepan with six ounces of sugar, and one quart of milk. Beat the yolks of six eggs and the whites of two. When it begins to boil pour in the eggs, stirring gently all the time. Pour the chocolate over the apple pulp, set the dish in a pan of boiling water and stand on the fire till firm.
A stovetop custard in two layers: sweetened apple pulp on the bottom, a chocolate custard poured over and set in a water bath. The only real difficulty is heat control, and one quantity in the original needs rethinking.
- The pound of chocolateIn Oscar's day chocolate for cooking generally meant unsweetened cake chocolate, grated or scraped for use. A full pound to a quart of milk makes an extremely dense, dark custard by modern standards; 8 oz of unsweetened or bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped, is closer to what a present-day palate expects, and you may want more than the 6 oz of sugar if you keep it unsweetened.
- "Scrape" means grateBlock chocolate was scraped with a knife so it would dissolve in the milk without lumps. A food processor, a box grater, or simply chopping fine does the same work.
- QuantitiesOne quart of milk is 4 cups; 6 oz sugar is a scant cup. "A few cooking-apples" is roughly 3 or 4 tart apples such as Bramley or Granny Smith, which cook down to about 1½ cups of pulp — enough to line the bottom of a 1½-quart dish.
- The hinge: never let the custard boilThe instruction to pour the eggs in "when it begins to boil" is the risky moment. Take the chocolate milk off the heat, temper it into the beaten eggs a ladle at a time, then return the mixture to low heat. Anything past about 180F and the eggs scramble; the finished custard should read 170–175F.
- "Stand on the fire till firm"This is a bain-marie: the dish sits in a pan of simmering, not boiling, water. The same thing can be done in the oven at 325F, water halfway up the dish, 40–50 minutes, until the centre still trembles slightly.
- The two whitesSix yolks to only two whites gives a rich custard with a soft set; the two whites add enough extra protein to firm a quart of liquid. Substituting whole eggs will give a firmer, more solid custard.
- Cinnamon and sweetening the applesNo amounts are given. Around 2 tablespoons sugar and ½ teaspoon cinnamon for 3 or 4 apples suits the dark chocolate above it; the apple layer should read as tart against the custard.
- Yield and servingServes 6 to 8. Chill several hours before serving — warm, the layers slide together; cold, they cut cleanly.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a fat compendium of over nine hundred pages that mixed hotel practice with the general domestic repertoire of the day. Chocolate custards belong to the second category: baked and stovetop custards were the backbone of American dessert cookery, and chocolate had by then become cheap and reliable enough — Dutch-process cocoa and pressed eating chocolate were both nineteenth-century developments — for it to appear routinely rather than as a luxury. Pairing it with stewed apple is the more old-fashioned touch: fruit purée under a custard has antecedents in English puddings, where the apple stretched the eggs and cut the richness. The recipe's vagueness about apples and cinnamon, set against precise weights for the chocolate and sugar, is typical of the book: it assumes a cook who already knows how to stew fruit and only needs telling the expensive part.