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Chocolate Sauce (To be served with vanilla ice)
(To be served with vanilla ice cream.) cup boiling water 2 squares unsweetened cup sugar chocolate 2 tablespoons butter teaspoon vanilla Pour water on chocolate and cook together, stirring until chocolate is melted and mixture is thick. Add sugar and cook a few minutes longer. Add butter and flavoring. cup sugar 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 cup boiling water
A four-ingredient hot fudge sauce whose fractions have been eaten by the scanner. The proportions are standard enough that the missing numbers can be read with confidence, but treat them as a reconstruction rather than the printed text.
- The missing fractionsEvery fraction in the ingredient column has dropped out of the transcription. A plausible reading, given the proportions of similar period sauces, is 1/2 cup boiling water, 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla with the 2 squares of chocolate and 2 tablespoons butter, but the printed amounts cannot be recovered. Start there and adjust sugar to taste.
- A square of chocolateOne square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the size the bars were then scored into. Two squares is 2 oz, roughly 1/3 cup of chopped unsweetened chocolate; if substituting cocoa, the usual rule is about 3 tablespoons cocoa plus 1 tablespoon fat per ounce.
- The hinge: cook the chocolate and water firstPouring boiling water onto chocolate and cooking it until thick before the sugar goes in is what appears to give this sauce its body without cornstarch; adding the sugar earlier tends to leave the mixture thinner and more syrupy.
- Heat and stirringMedium-low, stirring constantly. Chocolate scorches on the bottom of a thin pan; the sauce needs only two or three minutes of simmering after the sugar dissolves.
- Butter and vanilla go in off the heatButter and vanilla go in last -- The original simply says "Add butter and flavoring" at the end; it does not specify off the heat, but taking the pan off is sensible, since butter beaten into a boiling sauce can break and vanilla's aroma is volatile.
- The stray lines at the end"cup sugar / 1 tablespoon cornstarch / 1 cup boiling water" belongs to the next recipe in the section, not to this one. Ignore it here.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup, depending on which fractions you restore and how far it reduces; enough for several servings of ice cream. It thickens as it cools and stiffens in the refrigerator; warm it gently with a spoonful of water to pour again.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders for decades from the 1910s onward, part of a wider corporate-welfare effort that also produced pamphlets on nutrition, ventilation and infant care. That audience explains the recipe's shape: four cheap staples, no thermometer, no unusual equipment, and a yield sized for a family table. The sauce itself is a plain cooked chocolate sauce of the kind that spread with commercial ice cream, made in an era when unsweetened chocolate sold in scored one-ounce squares made "2 squares" a measurement every cook understood. Another recipe is visible at the foot of the page, thickened with cornstarch instead of reduced chocolate.