Having fallen in love with the dark and bitter flavors of 1800’s drinking chocolate, I’ve been eager to try some other chocolate recipes.

Chocolate custard sounded delicious, so I chose this recipe from 1883. What a surprise to find it a very different flavor experience than the drinking chocolate I’ve come to love.

Where 1800’s hot chocolate carries a strong, full-bodied chocolate flavor, this custard is only mildly chocolatey. Where drinking chocolate tended toward a less-sweet, even bitter, flavor profile, this recipe is sweet beyond what I was prepared for.

Dear reader, I couldn’t finish eating mine.

I told myself when I started this project that I wouldn’t only share the recipes I loved. That any 1800’s recipe carefully re-created deserves its moment. Today, that moment belongs to this chocolate custard.

And my guess is that if you take sugar in your coffee, you may genuinely enjoy it more than I did!

Here is a picture of the recipe as it appears in the cookbook:

Chocolate Custard, from The Appledore Cook Book, 1883. Page 167 *Photo Credit: The 1800’s Housewife.*

COOKING NOTES:

This is another easy little recipe, and it worked very well, following the instructions as written. I was delighted to find that the three minutes really was exactly how long it took this to cook.

What type of pan to use:

A double-boiler works very well, in place of the tin pail inside a kettle.

What chocolate to use:

An unsweetened, or barely sweetened, bar of chocolate would the right thing to use here. Regular unsweetened baker’s chocolate is a good choice, and if you happen to have unsweetened stone-ground chocolate available, that would be about as authentic as you can get.

{We talked at length about 1800’s chocolate when we made the drinking chocolate recipe a couple of weeks ago, so I won’t fully repeat the notes on choosing chocolate for re-creating nineteenth c. recipes as authentically as possible. But if you’d like, you can find those full notes here, along with that delicious hot chocolate recipe}.

📖 Recipe

Chocolate Custard

The Appledore Cook Book, 1883

A very sweet chocolate custard recipe.

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Calories: 185kcal

Ingredients

1 quart milk
1 ounce dark chocolate
1 cup sugar
6 eggs

Instructions

Set one quart of milk on to boil as before directed* (see note).
Scrape with a knife one ounce of nice chocolate, and mix with one heaping cup of sugar;
wet this with two spoonfuls of boiling milk;
work this into a paste with the back of the spoon, and stir into the boiling milk,
and then stir in six well-beaten eggs; stir three minutes,
and then strain.
Set in cold water and stir occasionally, until cold, then sir in two teaspoons of vanilla. Serve in glasses.

Notes

*Seems to be referencing this line in the "Soft Custard recipe, previous: "Put one quart of new milk into a tin pail, and set the pail into a kettle with boiling water"

Nutrition

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Chocolate Custard (1883)