Betty Lives!

Best Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes

1931

This is one of the oldest books I have and one of the most challenging to interpret for modern cooking. It was printed by Walter Baker & Company which was a division of General Foods and all the pictures are full color and depict rich and luscious chocolate desserts. Baker, you might realize, is he of “Baker’s Chocolate” and the book was written to promote the use of his product. I had been wanting to try it for a long time but felt hesitant because, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m an awful baker. But we went to Hershey Park recently and it was a vile, crowded experience filled with bad chocolate at every turn (not to mention adults shrieking at the site of walking Hershey Bars and children begging to be photographed with the Twizzlers). So upon our return I launched myself into this little book to find something chocolate AND edible.

The Chiffon Chocolate Pie had a great photo, and I’m a sucker for a great photo:

The ingredients are:

3 Squares Baker’s Unsweetened Chocolate, cut in pieces

2 1/2 cups cold milk

1 1/3 cups sugar

1/2 cup cornstarch

1/2 tsp salt

2 Tbl butter

3 egg yoks, slightly beaten

1 tsp vanilla

1 baked 9-inch pie shell

3 egg whites

6 Tbl sugar

Forgive me Walter, but in 1931 you probably had the best (the only?) chocolate on the market. Not so much in 2008. Today it’s quite possibly the worst so I took the liberty of substituting the three squares of Baker’s for an equivalent amount of Scharffen Berger unsweetened. The directions are contained in one tiny paragraph, and to the best of my knowledge it goes something like this: The chocolate is melted with milk (I used the microwave because the called-for double boiler would have taken all day) and then the sugar, cornstarch and salt are added. The mixture is thickened over heat and finally the butter and egg yolks are added. Unfortunately, because I am a crappy pastry cook, I didn’t realized that the filling really needs to be thickened completely on the stovetop. I cooked it until it was thick-ish and figured it would thicken further in the oven but I was WRONG. The filling was a little soupy, which also made it difficult to spread the meringue, as you can see. The shell is pre-baked, the chocolate filling is added, the meringue is spread, and the whole is baked for 20 minutes.

Soupy or not it was still chocolate and still pie, and therefore delicious.