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Chocolate (Take six table-spoons scraped)
Take six table-spoons scraped chocolate, or three of chocolate and three of cocoa, dissolve in a quart of boiling water, boil hard fifteen minutes, add one quart of rich milk, let scald and serve hot; this is enough for six persons. Cocoa can also be made after this recipe. Some boil either cocoa or chocolate only one minute and then serve, while others make it the day before using, boiling it for one hour, and when cool skimming off the oil, and when wanted for use, heat it to the boiling point and add the milk. In this way it is equally good and much more wholesome. Cocoa is from the seed of the fruit of a small tropical tree. There are several forms in which it is sold, the most nutritious and convenient being chocolate, the next cocoa, then cocoa nibs, and last cocoa shells. The ground bean is simply cocoa; ground fine and mixed with sugar it is chocolate; the beans broken into bits are "nibs." The shells are the shells of the bean, usually removed before grinding. The beans are roasted like coffee, and ground between hot rollers.
A breakfast-table cocoa from the era when chocolate arrived as a hard cake to be scraped with a knife rather than as powder in a tin. Most of the work here is in deciding which of the three methods the writer offers you actually want.
- The hinge: don't boil it hardFifteen minutes of hard boiling likely suited a coarse, gritty chocolate cake that needed breaking down. With modern chocolate or cocoa it scorches the solids and turns the drink bitter and grainy. The recipe's own alternative — one minute — is the one to follow, whisking as it comes to a simmer.
- "Scraped chocolate"This means a solid cake of chocolate shaved with a knife, not chocolate chips or syrup. Six tablespoons of shavings is roughly 1.5 to 2 oz by weight. As the book itself says, chocolate of the period was the ground bean mixed with sugar, though how sweet varied; unsweetened baking chocolate will need sugar added to taste.
- Cocoa then and nowThe cocoa of 1877 was often the whole ground bean, fat and all, which is why the writer expects an oil slick to skim. Today's cocoa powder has most of the cocoa butter pressed out and will not throw a skimmable layer, so the make-it-the-day-before method is pointless with it.
- "Let scald"Bring the milk just to the point where it steams and a rim of bubbles forms at the edge, around 180F. Boiling it gives the drink a cooked, faintly sulphurous flavour and a skin on top.
- On "much more wholesome"Skimming the fat was a digestibility argument, not a safety one — rich cocoa butter was thought to trouble invalids and children. Skip it unless you want a leaner drink.
- Cocoa nibs and shellsThe nibs and shells mentioned at the end were brewed as a weak tea-like infusion, simmered far longer than this recipe runs. Nibs are back in shops; shells are sold as cocoa husk tea. Neither substitutes for the chocolate here.
- YieldTwo quarts finished, serving six generously as the original says. Frothing it with a whisk or blender before pouring is traditional and improves the texture.
Buckeye Cookery belongs to the moment when drinking chocolate was shifting from a luxury prepared at the table to a household breakfast beverage, and the entry's little lecture on nibs, shells and grinding between hot rollers is the sort of instruction a cook needed when the product came as an unlabelled cake from the grocer rather than a branded tin. The distinction the book draws — ground bean is cocoa, ground with sugar is chocolate — was a real commercial one at the time, though "cocoa" and "cacao" were used almost interchangeably in English for the tree, the bean and the powder. The advice to boil a day ahead and skim the oil reflects a widespread Victorian conviction that cocoa butter was the indigestible part; the industrial answer to the same complaint was the hydraulic press developed by the Van Houten firm in the Netherlands in the 1820s, which removed much of the fat and produced the free-flowing powder that eventually made this recipe's skimming step obsolete.