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Hot Chocolate Sauce for Ice Cream
Into a clean saucepan put one pint of granulated sugar and one cupful of hot water. When sugar is dissolved boil without stirring, until a little dropped into cold water will quickly crisp and snap. Have ready two tablespoonfuls of cocoa dissolved in three tablespoonfuls of boiling water. Add this to the syrup and boil until, on testing, it is as brittle as before. Take quickly from the fire and serve at once.
This is a boiled-sugar sauce, not a cream-based one: taken to the hard-crack stage, it sets to a thin brittle shell the moment it meets cold ice cream. Everything depends on the sugar temperature.
- The hinge: hard crack, twiceSyrup that "will quickly crisp and snap" in cold water is hard crack, 300–310F. Adding the cocoa slurry drops the temperature, so the second boil has to bring it back to the same reading or the sauce will stay sticky instead of setting.
- A pint of sugarSugar was commonly measured by volume in American cookbooks of this period. A pint is 2 cups, about 14 oz or 400 g of granulated sugar, to 1 cup (8 fl oz) hot water.
- Use a thermometerThe cold-water test works, but a candy thermometer is faster and spares you repeated draws from a pan at 300F. Use a heavy saucepan; thin pans scorch sugar at this stage.
- Do not stirOnce the sugar has dissolved, leave it alone. Stirring at high temperature throws crystals up the sides and can seed the whole batch grainy. Wash down the pan walls with a wet brush if crystals form.
- The cocoa"Cocoa" here is plain unsweetened cocoa powder, not drinking-chocolate mix and not cocoa butter. Natural (non-alkalized) cocoa gives the sharper flavor this sweet a syrup needs. Whisk it smooth in the boiling water before it goes in, or it will lump.
- Serve at once, literallyThe sauce is unusable once it cools; it hardens in the pan. Have the ice cream dished and the eaters seated, and pour straight from the saucepan. Reheating a set batch works only briefly before it darkens and turns bitter.
- YieldAbout 1 to 1¼ cups of syrup, enough to shell six to eight servings. The finish is a crackable coating, not a pool of fudge sauce.
- HandlingSugar at 300F sticks to skin and keeps burning. Keep a bowl of cold water beside the stove and soak the pan rather than scraping it.
Hot sugar syrups poured over ice cream to set brittle anticipate the shelf-stable "crackle" toppings sold later in the twentieth century, though those work by a different trick — cocoa suspended in coconut oil that solidifies at cold temperatures rather than sugar taken to hard crack. What makes this version possible at all is cheap cocoa powder, a nineteenth-century product: pressing the fat out of roasted cacao to leave a fine soluble powder is generally traced to the Van Houten works in the Netherlands in the 1820s, and by the turn of the century tinned cocoa was a staple American pantry item. Ice cream itself had become achievable at home with the hand-crank freezer, so the cookbook's contribution is not the cream but the flourish on top — a dessert trick a hostess could bring off with sugar, water and two spoonfuls of cocoa.