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Novel, but Delicious
Ice cream served with hot chocolate sauce is a late culinary discovery that finds favor with many. The sauce is made of a pint of milk scalded and thickened with cornstarch to the consistency of cream. A square of melted chocolate is added with sugar and flavoring to taste. In serving the ice cream as a dessert the sauce is passed with it in a pretty pitcher.
The instructions are written as prose for a cook who already knows how to make a cornstarch sauce, so the quantities need filling in. The result is closer to a thin chocolate pudding sauce than to a modern ganache or fudge sauce.
- A square of chocolateConventionally one ounce of chocolate, the size a scored square generally ran to. The separate addition of sugar suggests it is unsweetened baking chocolate rather than a sweetened cake.
- Cornstarch, unmeasuredThe original gives no amount, only a target consistency. For a pint of milk, 2 to 3 teaspoons of cornstarch slaked in a little cold milk will bring it to pouring cream; more than a tablespoon and it sets up as a pudding once it cools.
- Sugar and flavouring "to taste"With an ounce of unsweetened chocolate in a pint of milk, roughly a third of a cup of sugar is the usual range, and the flavouring is almost certainly vanilla in a book of this date. Taste the sauce warm, since sweetness reads lower against cold ice cream.
- ScaldingScalded milk is heated to just below the boil, about 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge. Add the slaked cornstarch to the hot milk off the heat, then return it to a low burner and cook two or three minutes to lose the raw starch taste.
- Keeping it smoothCornstarch thickens fully only at a near boil, but held at a hard boil or stirred aggressively afterwards it thins again. Cook it just to thickness and stop.
- Skin and holdingA cornstarch sauce forms a skin within minutes. Press plastic wrap or buttered paper on the surface if it waits, and thin with a spoonful of hot milk before it goes to the table.
- YieldA pint of milk makes about two cups of sauce, enough for six to eight servings of ice cream.
Calling hot chocolate sauce on ice cream "a late culinary discovery" places this squarely in the soda-fountain era: the hot fudge and hot chocolate sundae are generally traced to American drugstore fountains in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s were still passing the idea along as a novelty worth naming. The sauce itself is not a fountain syrup but a domestic one, built on the cornstarch-thickened milk base that runs through this whole period of home cookery, when boxed cornstarch was cheap, reliable and marketed hard for exactly this kind of use. The instruction to pass it separately "in a pretty pitcher" shows presentation at table mattering as much as flavour, and a sauce poured by each guest was a small piece of theatre.