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Cream with Chocolate
Put four or five ounces of the best chocolate into a saucepan with one-half teacupful of water and two ounces of caster-sugar, place the saucepan over a slow fire, and stir the contents with a wooden spoon until the chocolate is well dissolved, then stir in gradually one and one-half pints of milk, and boil for ten minutes. Beat the yolks of four eggs and the white of one; remove the milk, etc., from the fire, and mix in the beaten eggs, stirring well; then pass the whole through a fine hair-sieve. Fill some small cream-cups with the mixture, and place them in the stewpan with hot water to three-fourths their height. When the cream thickens take the cups out of the pan, sprinkle over caster-sugar, and when cooled a trifle, place them on ice until required.
A chocolate pot de crème in all but name: a stirred custard base set gently in a water bath. The hinge is heat control — the custard must thicken below simmering, or the eggs curdle and the strained smoothness is lost.
- The measurementsA teacupful in this period is variously reckoned at anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz; it is genuinely imprecise, and since the water only serves to melt the chocolate, err small. One and a half pints of milk is 3 cups. Caster sugar is superfine granulated, which dissolves quickly into the hot chocolate.
- "The best chocolate"The phrase is vague, but in this period it most likely points to a solid eating or cooking chocolate, dark and only lightly sweetened, rather than chips with added stabilizers. A reasonable modern stand-in is 4-5 oz of 60-70% bar chocolate, chopped. If yours is very sweet, cut the 2 oz sugar back by half.
- Do not actually boil ten minutesTen minutes at a boil scalds the milk, thickens it by evaporation and encourages a skin. Bring the chocolate and milk to just below a simmer, hold two or three minutes to marry them, and take it off.
- Adding the eggsFour yolks plus one white for 3 cups of milk gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm flan. Let the chocolate milk cool a minute, then pour it into the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking, rather than dropping the eggs into hot liquid.
- Hair-sieveA horsehair sieve was the fine strainer of the period. Any fine-mesh conical or drum sieve works; strain to catch chalazae and any set egg. Skim the foam off the surface so the finished tops are glossy.
- The water bathThe original sets the cups in a stewpan of hot water on the stove, which is workable but hard to regulate. An oven at 325F with the cups in a roasting pan of hot water reaching three-quarters up their sides is steadier. Cover the pan loosely with foil.
- Knowing when it is doneThirty to forty minutes for 4 oz cups. The centers should still wobble as a unit when nudged; an instant-read thermometer shows 170-175F. Carry-over heat finishes them, and a fully firm custard has already gone grainy.
- Yield and servingEnough for six small pots or eight very small ones. The sugar sprinkled over while warm dissolves into a thin gloss rather than a crust; chill at least three hours before serving.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a compendium of the hotel's largely French repertoire, and this is a plain pot de crème au chocolat under an English title. The vocabulary leans British: caster sugar and hair-sieve are both British kitchen terms. The "cream-cups" are the sort of small pots associated with pots de crème, a name that refers simply to pots of cream. Chocolate as a dessert flavoring rather than a drink had become routine in American hotel kitchens by the 1890s, helped by widely available eating chocolate; the recipe's instruction to melt it with water first may be a holdover from the older practice of treating chocolate as something you dissolved into a beverage.