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Chocolate Sandwich
Melt a teaspoonful of butter in a saucepan, stir into it all the unsweetened chocolate (bitter) it will take up. Grate the chocolate directly into the butter. Stir until butter and chocolate are thoroughly mixed. Take from the fire and let it get cold before spreading on thin slices of graham bread, lightly buttered. Cover with another slice and cut in strips.
A two-ingredient spread that depends entirely on ratio and temperature. The original gives no quantity for the chocolate, so a little judgment is required at the pan.
- "All it will take up"This is a ratio by feel: melt the butter over very low heat and grate in chocolate until you have a stiff, glossy paste rather than a sauce. The proportion will end up heavily weighted towards chocolate, with the butter acting only as a binder. The original measurement is genuinely open-ended, so work in small additions and stop when it stops combining smoothly.
- Unsweetened chocolate"Bitter" chocolate here is plain cake chocolate, sold in hard blocks meant for grating — the same product still sold as unsweetened baking chocolate. There is no sugar anywhere in this recipe, and the result tastes like it. If that is not the intention, use a bittersweet bar or work a little confectioners' sugar into the paste.
- Grating directly into the panThe instruction is deliberate. Chocolate grated straight onto warm butter melts fast and evenly; a whole chunk sitting in a hot pan will scorch on the bottom before the top softens. Keep the heat low and take the pan off as soon as the mixture is smooth.
- Do not let water near itMelted chocolate seizes into a grainy mass on contact with even a few drops of water or steam. Dry pan, dry spatula, no double boiler with the water at a rolling boil.
- CoolingCold, as the recipe says, but not refrigerator-cold — chilled chocolate butter sets hard enough to tear soft bread. Room temperature, spreadable but not fluid, is the working point. If it firms up too much, a minute in a warm bowl brings it back.
- Graham breadCoarse whole-wheat bread, closer to a dense sandwich loaf than to a graham cracker. Any good whole-wheat loaf works; the point is that its slight bitterness and nutty flavor stand up to unsweetened chocolate.
- Yield and servingThe recipe fixes no yield; a teaspoon of butter's worth of paste will not go far, so scale up if you need more than a sandwich or two. Cut into narrow strips as directed -- these were tea-table fingers, not lunch. Cut with a serrated knife and press the top slice gently so the strips hold together.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the sandwich had become the fixture of afternoon tea, card parties, picnic hampers and school lunches, and hostesses wanted variety past ham and cheese. The sweet chapters of such books are full of fillings that read oddly now: jam mixed with nuts, maple sugar, dates pounded to a paste, and this — a chocolate butter with no sugar in it at all. Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached coarse unsifted wheat flour, and by 1900 the name had settled into general use for any whole-meal loaf. The chocolate itself would have come as a hard unsweetened block of the kind sold for cooking since the eighteenth century; grating it was ordinary kitchen work before chips and easy-melt wafers existed. The combination of bitter chocolate and whole-grain bread sits comfortably alongside a modern tartine of dark chocolate on buttered sourdough, which suggests the idea was sound rather than merely thrifty.