“I can recall even what we gave them that evening with which to refresh themselves. We ordered the zenzai or its ally, the shiruko, at the establishment round the corner. The shiruko seems like hot, thick chocolate, with bits of toast in it. The chocolate part is prepared of red beans, and the toast is the browned mochi (rice-cake). To provide for any among them that did not love sweet things we had the soba or the udon brought to us by their vender. The soba is a sort of vermicelli made of buckwheat, and the udon a kind of macaroni, solid and not in tubes. The warm katsuwo sauce is plentifully poured over them, and they are eaten with chopsticks. The katsuwo sauce is prepared of the katsuwobushi and the shoyu. The first named article is a hard substance shaped somewhat like the horn of an ox, and manufactured of the flesh of certain fish, whose vernacular name is katsuwo. A family cannot get along without it. In preparing the sauce, the katsuwobushi is simply chipped and simmered in a mixture of water and the shoyu. The shoyu is a sauce by itself and brewed of wheat, beans and salt. As its use in domestic cookery is very wide, the demand for it is correspondingly great; and the shoyu brewing is as big a business as the saké manufacturing.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Put one pint of milk in the double-boiler, and on the fire. Shave two ounces of Walter Baker and Co.'s Chocolate, and put it in a small pan with four tablespoonfuls of sugar and two of boiling water. Stir over the fire until smooth and glossy, and add to the hot milk. Beat together for eight minutes the yolks of four eggs, three tablespoonfuls of sugar, and a saltspoonful of salt, and then add one gill of cold milk. Pour the boiling milk on this, stirring well. Return to the double-boiler, and cook for five minutes, stirring all the time. Pour into a cold bowl and set the bowl in cold water. Stir for a few minutes, and then occasionally until the sauce is cold. This sauce is nice for cold or hot cornstarch pudding, bread pudding, cold cabinet pudding, snow pudding, etc. It will also answer for a dessert. Fill custard glasses with it, and serve the same as soft custard; or have the glasses two-thirds full, and heap up with whipped cream.
Sources: The passage is from Shigemi Shiukichi, A Japanese Boy, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Parloa, Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes and Home Made Candy Recipes of 1909, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — navy cloth, teapot stamp.