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Chocolate Custard
Mrs. Higgins.
Three ounces Baker's chocolate, three pints milk, four tablespoons white sugar, two tablespoons brown sugar ; prepare a soft custard of the milk and the yolks of five eggs and the white of one ; dissolve the chocolate in a cup of warm milk and heat it to boiling point; when cool, sweeten it with brown sugar and flavour with the extract of vanilla; pour the whole into a dish and cover with the whites of the five eggs beaten stiff, with a little sugar; brown slightly and serve cold.
A stirred custard under a browned meringue, in the manner of a queen of puddings without the bread. The instructions assume you already know how to bring a custard to the thickening point without curdling it, which is the whole of the difficulty here.
- The hinge: never boil the custardThe milk and yolks must be cooked over low or indirect heat, stirring, until the mixture coats a spoon — roughly 170-180F. A moment of boiling scrambles it. The chocolate mixture is separately brought to a boil, which is fine, but it goes in after the custard is off the heat and cooled.
- MeasuresThree pints is 6 cups of milk; three ounces of chocolate is three squares of the old baking bars. The custard is thin by modern standards — closer to a pouring boiled custard than a set baked one.
- Baker's chocolateThis means Walter Baker & Co. unsweetened baking chocolate, not a sweetened eating bar. Substitute 3 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped, or the sugar balance will collapse.
- The two sugarsThe recipe only says where the brown sugar goes: it sweetens the chocolate after cooling. By elimination the four tablespoons of white sugar must belong in the custard, though the text does not say so. Six tablespoons total across 6 cups of milk is restrained — taste and adjust before combining.
- Egg whitesOne white goes into the custard, yet the recipe then calls for "the whites of the five eggs" for the meringue — an inconsistency in the original. In practice four are left; beat them stiff with a little sugar (allow about a tablespoon per white). Separate carefully, as any yolk in the whites will keep them from mounting.
- "Brown slightly"The book gives no oven instruction beyond the words themselves. In a modern kitchen that means a hot oven — say 425-450F — for a few minutes, or a broiler watched constantly. The meringue is only being coloured, not cooked through, so it will stay soft — this is a soft meringue and should be eaten the day it is made.
- ServingNo yield is given. Six cups of custard is a scant quart and a half, and with the meringue heaped on top you will want a dish larger than two quarts; it will serve eight or so. It is served cold, so allow several hours of chilling after browning.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," with many contributions signed with the donor's name — hence Mrs. Higgins at the head of this one. The specification of "Baker's chocolate" is a small piece of evidence about the period's kitchens: the Dorchester, Massachusetts mill that became Walter Baker & Co. had been grinding cacao since 1765, and by the 1870s its unsweetened cakes were among the most widely advertised and available chocolates in North America, sold to be dissolved in hot milk rather than eaten out of hand. Naming the brand pointed to plain ground cacao rather than a sweetened or spiced mixture. The dish itself belongs to the large family of nineteenth-century boiled custards finished with a meringue of the leftover whites — an economy as much as a flourish, since a custard wants yolks and leaves the whites with nowhere else to go.