Hilda Gerber’s chocolate sauce is amazing.
It’s amazingly naughty and amazingly rich and for me an amazingly strong memory of Christmas and Hogmanay from my childhood. It’s also ridiculously easy to make. And once you can make Hilda Gerbers (the sauce is always just called Hilda Gerbers in our family) you can make the infamous Meringue Mountain, all gloriously seventies.
Hilda Gerber was a cookery writer in the 30s and 40s in South Africa. Her manuscript for Traditional Cooking of the Cape Malays was found and published after her death in 1954. Cape Malays are the descendents of slaves and political exiles, mostly from Indonesia and Bengal, who were brought to the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th and 18th century by the Dutch East India Company. Their name derives from the trader language they spoke, called Malayu. During the apartheid years any Cape Malay who converted from Islam to Christianity was reclassified as Cape Coloured. Their spices and condiments from the East, which arrived on the ships on their way back to Holland, pepped up the bland Dutch recipes in their colonial kitchens.
I intend to seek out some Malay recipes – I think the only one I have is Bobotie from my Aunt Joyce. But surely I can get a Bredie recipe from my Aunt Astri? And I’ve wanted to make mebos (delicious nuggets of salty-sweet dried fruit) for AGES but I suspect Scotland does not have the climate for drying fruit.
Anyway, Hilda Gerber used to ask local Malay women for recipes, so she could record them for posterity and compile a recipe book. Some of the Malay women silently sabotaged her efforts to create an indigenous cookbook, and would miss out a key ingredient, such as the milk in potato pudding, so any efforts to make it will end up with potato scrambled eggs. Hmmm, I’ll bet you’re not wanting to make this chocolate sauce now?
Anyway, all of that I have discovered in the last 24 hours, but Hilda Gerbers (the sauce) has been known to me all my life. I wasn’t exactly weaned on it (although if I was it would go some way to explaining my current size) but it was always there on special occasions. I suspect the recipe came via my grandmother who lived for many years from the 30s through to the 80s in South Africa. So, here we go:
Hilda Gerbers Rich Chocolate Sauce
4oz dark chocolate
4oz icing sugar
- In a bowl over a pan of water, melt the chocolate. Make sure the bowl is big enough to take everything, as all the other ingredients will be added to this later.
- Once melted, add the icing sugar. You’ll think it’s all gone badly wrong, when it turns into rubble, but trust me, it’s ok.
- Add eggs and beat in, one by one. Keep warm, but do NOT boil. It’s looking a bit better now, huh?
- Now take off the heat and cut the butter into chunks into the mixture. Stir a bit, but leave to melt in and then stir a bit again
- That’s it.
- Leave it somewhere cool. Then eat.
Or, instead of just eating it by the spoonful, make a Meringue Mountain.
Make some meringues, the more the better. Big ones, little ones, medium ones. Crunchy ones and chewy ones. Just lots.
And beat some cream, with a wee bit of sugar and vanilla if you want, but it’s not really necessary.
Now make the mountain. Stick some meringues to the bottom of your dish with a dab of cream. Now squidge some cream on top of the meringues, so you can add another layer. And keep going with layers of meringue and cream until you have a mountain. Then pour the chocolate sauce over the top. You’ll need to have taken it out of the fridge a while before pouring, or it just won’t pour. Think about it, it’s mostly butter and chocolate which are quite solid in a fridge.
You can do all manner of other things with it other than the Meringue Mountain, but remember it is incredibly rich – so you won’t need much of it. I suspect it would be good with a teeny tiny chocolate brownie and some vanilla icecream. Or have I just gone too far?
Oh, and don’t even think of giving this to pregnant women. Or getting pregnant while you’re eating it. DANGER.
I’m about to go make a batch to have on Christmas Eve. Nom nom nom.