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Chocolate Syrup
Mix half a pound of scraped chocolate cake with one quart of water, add four pounds of loaf-sugar, and stir over a slow fire until the chocolate is dissolved and the sugar syruped.
A soda-fountain syrup base rather than a dessert sauce: the sugar ratio is far higher than anything a modern cook would pour over ice cream. Scaled down it makes a keeping syrup for chocolate milk and egg creams.
- "Chocolate cake" is a block of chocolateNot a layer cake. Nineteenth-century chocolate was sold in pressed cakes or bars, and "scraped" means shaved fine with a knife or grater so it dissolves. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, 8 oz, chopped or grated.
- Loaf-sugarRefined white sugar, sold in hard cones that were nipped into lumps. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, weight for weight.
- The ratio is extremeFour pounds of sugar to one quart of water is roughly a 2:1 syrup by weight, denser than simple syrup and near saturation. That is deliberate for a shelf-stable fountain syrup; for a pourable sauce, halve the sugar.
- Slow fire means low heatDo not let it boil hard. The point is to dissolve, not to concentrate; boiling drives off water and pushes an already-saturated syrup toward crystallizing or scorching on the bottom. Stir until no grit remains on the spoon.
- CrystallizationAt this concentration the syrup will throw sugar crystals as it cools and sits. A tablespoon of corn syrup or a squeeze of lemon added with the sugar keeps it fluid, though the original text does not call for it.
- Unsweetened chocolate needs help emulsifyingCocoa butter separates and floats. Whisk well off the heat, and expect to shake or stir the jar before each use.
- Yield and useRoughly two to two and a half quarts of very sweet syrup. Roughly two tablespoons per glass of cold milk or seltzer. Refrigerate; the high sugar content keeps it for weeks.
The book comes from an era when a grand hotel might run a soda and ice-cream department alongside the kitchen, and a syrup of this kind could have been made in bulk for chocolate milk, ice-cream sodas and egg creams -- though the recipe itself says nothing about its use. The very high sugar load acts as a preservative: before reliable refrigeration, a syrup near saturation resists fermentation, and mould is largely confined to the surface. The phrase "chocolate cake" is the older commercial sense of the word, a compressed block of ground cacao, which is why the instruction is to scrape it rather than melt it; cocoa powder, patented in the Netherlands in the 1820s and widespread by Oscar's day, would have dispersed differently and is not what is called for here.