Chocolate Soup
(Italy.) Boil 2 ounces of grated chocolate, a spoonful of vanilla, sugar to taste, and one quart of milk, until smooth. Add the yolks of 4 eggs well beaten, take off and pour over slices of stale sponge cake. Serve cold.
A dessert soup that is essentially a thin chocolate custard poured over sponge cake — closer to a loose zuppa inglese than to anything savoury. The hinge is the egg yolks: once they go in, the mixture must not return to a boil.
- The chocolate"Grated chocolate" in recipes of this kind usually means plain unsweetened cake chocolate, which would explain why sugar is added separately, though sweetened eating chocolate was also available. Two ounces of modern unsweetened or 100% bar, grated or finely chopped, is the closest equivalent; if you use a 70% bar, cut the added sugar sharply.
- "Sugar to taste"With unsweetened chocolate and a quart of milk, somewhere between a third and a half cup gives a dessert that reads as sweet without being cloying. Sweeten the milk before the yolks go in, so you are not stirring sugar into a set custard.
- "A spoonful of vanilla"Genuinely ambiguous. If it means extract, a teaspoon is plenty for a quart; if it means a vanilla sugar or vanilla powder, of the sort also used for flavouring, rather more. Start with a teaspoon of extract and add at the end, since prolonged boiling drives off the aroma.
- Temper the yolksThe instruction to "add the yolks" to boiling milk will scramble them if taken literally. Whisk a ladle or two of the hot chocolate milk into the beaten yolks first, return the mixture to the pan off the direct heat, then stir over low heat only until it coats a spoon.
- Temperature, not timeThe custard thickens at about 175-180F and curdles not far above that. A thermometer settles it; failing that, pull the pan the moment the foam on top disappears and the liquid clings to the back of a spoon.
- Strain and chillPass the finished soup through a fine sieve to catch any threads of set egg, then cool it quickly and refrigerate. "Serve cold" means properly cold — an egg-and-milk mixture should not sit out cooling for hours.
- The cakeStale sponge is specified because fresh sponge collapses into paste. Day-old sponge, savoiardi or plain pound cake all hold their shape. The recipe pours the custard over the slices as it comes off the heat and chills the whole; if you prefer the cake firmer, pour the cooled custard over shortly before serving instead.
- YieldA quart of milk with four yolks serves six generously as a dessert course, four if the bowls are large.
Chocolate soup belongs to a long European habit of treating chocolate as a drink and a dessert liquid rather than a confection — Italy and Spain had drinking chocolate a century or more before it was widely eaten in bars, and thickened, egg-enriched versions were served warm or cold at the end of a meal. Pouring that custard over stale sponge places it squarely in the same family as zuppa inglese and the various zuppe dolci, dishes traditionally said to have been built to use up cake that has gone dry rather than throw it out. Books of this kind gathered dishes labelled by country as a kind of armchair travel for the American housekeeper, and the attributions are best read as an indication of origin rather than as documented regional recipes.