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Baker's English Breakfast Cocoa
Boil three cups milk. For three cups take a heaping table spoon of the Cocoa dissolved in some of the boiling milk, add sugar and boil ten or fifteen minutes. Then take the yolk of one egg and beat in a little cold milk and add to the Cocoa. After removing from the fire. Beat the white of the egg to a froth with sugar and put on each cup after it is poured out.
A hot cocoa enriched with egg, in the style company pamphlets promoted around 1900. Two things need attention: the paste-making at the start and the long boil, which modern practice has cut back sharply.
- Make a smooth paste firstThis is the hinge. Cocoa powder will not disperse in hot liquid on its own — stir the heaping tablespoon with two or three tablespoons of the hot milk into a stiff, glossy paste, then thin it gradually before it goes back into the pan. Dumped in dry it forms lumps that no amount of whisking will break up.
- Ten to fifteen minutes is too longLong boils are standard in period cocoa directions, though the reason is not stated. Modern cocoa needs no more than three to five minutes at a bare simmer, and a long boil in an uncovered pan scorches the milk solids on the bottom and throws a thick skin on top.
- "Baker's English Breakfast Cocoa"Unsweetened natural cocoa with much of the fat pressed out — not a sweetened drinking-chocolate mix and not Dutch-process. Any plain unsweetened natural cocoa stands in. Substituting a modern sweetened mix will make the added sugar redundant.
- StrengthOne heaping tablespoon to three cups is thin by current taste. A tablespoon per cup gives the depth most people now expect from hot cocoa.
- Sugar is unmeasuredThe original leaves the amount to the cook. Two teaspoons per cup suits unsweetened cocoa; reserve a teaspoon or so for beating into the white.
- Adding the yolkOff the heat, as written, and temper it: beat the yolk with the cold milk, then dribble a ladleful of the hot cocoa into the egg while whisking before returning the mixture to the pan. Poured straight in, the yolk curdles into threads. Do not let it come back to a boil.
- The raw white on topThe beaten white is a garnish and is not properly cooked; the hot cocoa may set the underside at most. If raw egg is a concern for anyone at the table, use pasteurized eggs or leave the froth off; whipped cream does the same job.
- YieldThree cups of milk, plus the egg, fills three generous cups or four small ones. Serve at once; the froth collapses within a few minutes.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate mill back to 1765 and was for much of the nineteenth century the best-known chocolate name in the United States; "Breakfast Cocoa" was its brand of cocoa with a large part of the cocoa butter pressed out, the process generally credited to Van Houten's press of the 1820s, which turned chocolate from a rich, fatty drink into a powder that mixed more readily with milk. Recipes carrying a brand name in the title, as this one does, often reached household cookbooks by way of company leaflets and premium pamphlets, which manufacturers distributed free and which compilers reprinted with the trademark intact. The egg is a common period gesture toward nourishment: at a time when cocoa was recommended to invalids, children and the elderly as a food rather than a stimulant, a beaten yolk stirred in and a sweetened white floated on top turned a breakfast cup into something closer to a light meal.