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Chocolate Sauce (Tablespoons hot water cup)
2 tablespoons hot water cup sugar cup hot milk cup double cream 2 eggs teaspoon cinnamon teaspoon vanilla Melt chocolate, add sugar and hot water, and cook until smooth and glossy. Add milk. Beat eggs. Combine as for a custard; strain. When cold, add flavoring and whipped cream. cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar Cream butter well.
Add vanilla. cup butter
This is a cooked custard sauce built on melted chocolate, thinned with milk and lightened with whipped cream at the end. The quantities as printed have lost their fractions, so treat the proportions below as guidance rather than transcription.
- The missing amountsIn the chocolate sauce, every measure except the two tablespoons of hot water and the two eggs appears without its fraction, and the chocolate has no quantity at all. Something like 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup hot milk and 1/2 cup cream would give a workable sauce, but that is a guess: the original figures cannot be recovered from the text.
- What "chocolate" means hereIn an American cookbook of this type this is unsweetened baking chocolate in squares, not chips and not cocoa powder. The sugar in the recipe is doing all the sweetening.
- Double creamIn American books the term was used loosely for the richer of the two creams sold, in practice ordinary heavy whipping cream, rather than the much fattier British double cream. Heavy cream is the right substitute; it must be cold to whip.
- The hinge: custard temperature"Combine as for a custard" means pouring the hot chocolate-milk mixture slowly into the beaten eggs while whisking, then cooking gently until it coats a spoon, around 170 to 180F. Above that the eggs curdle and no amount of straining will bring back the texture.
- Strain, then chill completelyStraining catches the inevitable threads of set egg. The sauce must be fully cold before the whipped cream goes in, or the cream will slacken and the sauce will separate.
- Cinnamon and vanillaBoth go in at the end, after the custard is cold. The fractions are lost, but a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon suits this volume; more reads as spice rather than chocolate.
- Yield and useAs reconstructed, about 2 cups, enough for six to eight servings. Because it is a cream-lightened cold sauce it suits plain steamed puddings, sponge cake or ice cream, and it should be spooned over rather than poured.
- StorageAn egg custard sauce keeps two days at most under refrigeration, and it will not freeze or reheat once the whipped cream is folded in.
Dessert sauces often occupied their own chapter in American utility and community cookbooks, a household being expected to keep a repertoire of them: hard sauce for steamed puddings, foamy sauce for cottage pudding, chocolate for everything else. This one is more ambitious than a plain chocolate syrup, since it is really a chocolate crème anglaise finished with whipped cream rather than a cornstarch-thickened sauce. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed cookbooks of this kind free to policyholders, pairing household advice with public-health messaging about diet; recipes of this sort assume a cook who already understands what "combine as for a custard" requires.