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Chocolate Cream (II)
Mrs. King.
Half a cake of chocolate dissolved in a little hot water; put in a cup of milk, and when it boils have five eggs well beaten and mixed with two cups of milk ; pour the hot chocolate into the eggs and milk; stir well and boil all together for a few minutes; sweeten to your taste.
To be eaten cold.
This is a stirred custard, not a mousse or a set cream — three cups of milk thickened with five eggs and flavored with unsweetened chocolate. The one thing to ignore is the instruction to boil it.
- Do not boil the custardFive eggs in three cups of milk will thicken at around 175-180F and curdle above about 185F. Cook it over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon, then pull it off immediately. Period recipes frequently say "boil" where little more than a bare simmer can have been meant.
- "Half a cake of chocolate"Genuinely ambiguous. Nineteenth-century unsweetened chocolate was pressed into cakes of varying size, including quarter- and half-pound cakes, so "half a cake" cannot be pinned down. Somewhere between 1 and 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate suits three cups of milk; more than that and you will need noticeably more sugar.
- Chocolate here means unsweetenedThe recipe sweetens separately, which tells you the chocolate carried no sugar. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, not a modern bar or chips. Dissolving it in a little hot water first, as directed, prevents grittiness.
- Sweeten early, taste late"Sweeten to your taste" is easier to manage if you add most of the sugar to the milk before heating so it dissolves fully. Start with about 1/3 cup and adjust off the heat; chilled custard tastes less sweet than warm.
- Strain and chillPour the finished custard through a fine sieve into a cold bowl to catch any coagulated egg, then cover and refrigerate at least three hours. It is meant to be eaten cold, in cups or glasses.
- Insurance against curdlingA teaspoon of cornstarch whisked into the beaten eggs stabilizes the custard and makes it far more forgiving of a moment's inattention. It is not in the original.
- YieldAbout a quart, or six small cups — this was served as a spooned dessert cream rather than a drink.
Chocolate creams like this one sit at the point where drinking chocolate turned into a dessert. Chocolate reached ordinary American households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mainly as hard unsweetened cakes to be grated or shaved and dissolved in hot liquid, and cookbooks of the 1870s treat it as a flavoring in that liquid form rather than as an ingredient in bars or chips. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published 1874, with later printings including 1876) was one of the earliest and best-selling American community cookbooks, compiled from contributions by named local women and sold for charity — hence the attribution to Mrs. King and what appears, on the evidence of the editorial numbering, to be a second, differing chocolate cream elsewhere in the volume. The brevity is characteristic: contributors were writing for other experienced cooks, who would have known without being told that a custard stirred over the fire is watched, not walked away from.