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Chocolate Sauce
Put one ounce of chocolate in a lined saucepan with half a pint of milk, and a few drops of essence of vanilla; sweeten to taste and stir over the fire until boiling. Beat the yolks of four eggs, stir with the boiling sauce at the side of the fire until the eggs are thickened, but do not let it boil again.
A thin pouring custard flavored with chocolate, meant for ladling over puddings and ices rather than spooning from a jar. The whole recipe turns on keeping the eggs below a boil.
- The hinge: no second boilOnce the yolks go in, hold the pan over low heat and stir constantly until the sauce coats a spoon, around 175-180F. Above about 185F the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into grains that no amount of stirring will smooth.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range the cooler edge of the top gave gentle, indirect heat. Use your lowest burner, or set a bowl over barely simmering water if you want insurance.
- Temper firstAdd the hot chocolate milk to the beaten yolks a ladle at a time, whisking, then return the mixture to the pan. Pouring four yolks straight into boiling milk, as the wording suggests, scrambles them.
- Half a pintOne cup of milk. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim will taste watery.
- The chocolateAn ounce of "chocolate" in 1896 means unsweetened block chocolate, not a chip or a bar with sugar already in it. Use one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped, and sweeten separately -- about 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar for a cup of milk.
- Lined saucepanMost likely a tin-lined copper pan, though enameled and porcelain-lined pans were also called lined; bare copper was avoided for delicate egg mixtures. Any heavy stainless or enameled pan does the job.
- Essence of vanillaModern vanilla extract; "a few drops" is a quarter teaspoon or less. Because it goes in at the start, some aroma cooks off; adding it after the sauce comes off the heat keeps more of it.
- Strain and yieldPass the finished sauce through a fine sieve to catch any set egg. Makes a scant cup and a half, enough to sauce four to six servings of pudding, and it thickens further as it cools.
This is crème anglaise under a plain American name: milk, yolks, sugar, flavoring, thickened just short of the boil. Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf from its opening in 1893, and the 1896 book that carries his name collects a large hotel repertoire, which may be why a sauce like this appears with almost no explanation -- the proportion was the point, not the method. The chocolate would likely have been solid unsweetened chocolate, ground or shaved before use; sweetening was left to the cook, presumably because sugar levels were adjusted to whatever pudding, charlotte, or frozen cream the sauce was destined for.