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Chocolate Pudding
One quart sweet milk, three ounces grated chocolate, one cup sugar, yolks of five eggs; scald milk and chocolate together, and, when cool, add sugar and eggs, and bake. When done, put beaten whites and five table-spoons sugar on top, and set in oven to brown. Or, boil one pint milk, add half cup butter, one of sugar, and three ounces grated chocolate; pour this over two slices of bread soaked in water; when cool, add the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, bake, and when done, spread over the whites beaten with sugar, and brown in oven. Serve hot or cold. - Miss Greeley Grubbs, Richmond,
A baked custard under a meringue lid, given in two versions: a plain chocolate custard and a thriftier bread-thickened one. Neither gives an oven temperature or a time, so the doneness cues below matter more than the clock.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyThis is a stirred-free baked custard with no starch to protect it. Bake at 325F, ideally in a water bath, until the center still wobbles as a single mass when nudged; a knife slid in an inch from the edge should come out clean. Any hotter and the eggs curdle and weep chocolate-colored whey.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk also commonly on hand in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Use whole milk; skim gives a thin, watery set.
- Grated chocolateThree ounces of baking chocolate; chocolate sold in hard cakes for grating was generally unsweetened, though sweetened cakes existed too. Chopping it fine does the same work as grating. Do not substitute cocoa powder measure for measure, and do not use sweetened chocolate or the pudding will cloy against the full cup of sugar.
- "When cool, add sugar and eggs"This is tempering by patience. Let the scalded milk drop to roughly bath temperature before the yolks go in, or they will set into threads. Straining the finished custard through a sieve catches any that did.
- The meringueFive whites with five tablespoons sugar makes a soft meringue. Beat to firm peaks, spread to the very edge of the dish so it seals, and brown at 350F for 10-15 minutes rather than under a broiler, which colors it before the interior sets.
- The second versionHalf a cup of butter to a pint of milk is very rich by current taste; a quarter cup is closer to modern balance if you make it. "Two slices of bread soaked in water" means ordinary white loaf, squeezed out, torn up, and whisked into the hot milk until it disappears. It gives body rather than the loose slices of a bread pudding.
- Vessel and yieldThe first version fills a 2-quart baking dish and serves eight. A wide shallow dish sets faster and more evenly than a deep one, and gives a better ratio of meringue to custard.
- Serving"Hot or cold" is accurate, but meringue weeps if refrigerated overnight. Eat it the day it is baked.
Baked chocolate custards like this one sit at the point where chocolate stopped being chiefly a drink and became a dessert flavor in American home cooking. Through most of the nineteenth century chocolate reached the kitchen as a hard, unsweetened cake to be grated, and the technique here -- scald it into milk, sweeten separately, thicken with yolks -- is inherited directly from the chocolate-drink recipes that preceded it. The leftover whites go straight onto the top as meringue, an economy that may help explain why so many custard puddings of the period wear one. The Dixie Cook-Book, the Southern counterpart to Estelle Woods Wilcox's Midwestern Buckeye Cookery and likewise associated with her name, gathered its recipes by contribution and printed the contributor's name and town; Miss Greeley Grubbs of Richmond offering two versions in one entry -- one for a full larder, one stretched with a couple of slices of bread -- is typical of how these books actually worked.