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Chocolate Sauce
Pour half pint cold milk in a small saucepan with two ounces grated chocolate; place the pan on the fire and slowly boil for two minutes, occasionally stirring. Have in another small saucepan two ounces granulated sugar with two egg yolks and quarter of a teaspoon vanilla; briskly whisk for two minutes; then gradually add the milk and chocolate, whisking constantly meanwhile. Place the pan on the fire and continually whisk for five minutes. Strain the same through a Chinese strainer and use as directed.
This is a chocolate crème anglaise in all but name: a stirred egg-yolk custard, thin enough to pour. Everything depends on keeping it below a boil once the yolks go in.
- The hinge: no boiling after the eggs"Continually whisk for five minutes" over direct heat is the risky step. Hold the custard at 175-180F over medium-low heat, stirring without pause, until it coats a spoon; past about 185F the yolks scramble and no amount of straining will save the texture.
- Half pintOne cup of milk. The finished sauce makes roughly a cup; the recipe gives no yield or serving count.
- Two ounces grated chocolateAt this date this would ordinarily mean unsweetened block chocolate. Use 2 oz (about 1/3 cup chopped) unsweetened or 100% baking chocolate; if you substitute semisweet, cut the sugar by roughly half.
- "Place the pan on the fire"A range top of the period. The first stage, milk and chocolate boiled two minutes, appears to be only to melt and disperse the chocolate; medium heat and frequent stirring keep it from catching on the bottom.
- Tempering"Gradually add the milk and chocolate, whisking constantly" is the whole safeguard against curdling. Add the hot liquid a ladle at a time to the yolk and sugar mixture, not the reverse.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the job; it catches stray bits of coagulated yolk and undissolved chocolate.
- Serving and keepingGood warm or cold. Chill with plastic wrap on the surface to stop a skin forming, and use within two days; it will thicken slightly as it cools.
Chocolate sauce of this kind belongs to the repertoire of stirred custards, and its presence in a book called The International Cook Book reflects the era's professional kitchens, the book being the work of Alexander Filippini, of the restaurant Delmonico's, who supplied recipes for a domestic audience. The instruction to strain through a chinois is the giveaway: it is written by someone accustomed to a brigade's equipment. Grated chocolate, rather than chopped or melted, was standard direction well into the twentieth century, when commercial baking chocolate came in hard cakes. Note also that the sauce ends "use as directed" -- in a book of this sort a sauce is a component, cross-referenced from the puddings and frozen desserts that needed it, not a dish in its own right.