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Vienna Chocolate
Put into a coffee-pot set in boiling water, one quart of new milk: (or a pint each of cream and milk), stir into it three heaping tablespoons grated chocolate mixed to a paste with cold milk, let it boil two or three minutes, and serve at once. To make good chocolate, good materials are required. season.
A four-line drinking-chocolate recipe from a book that assumed you knew what a coffee-pot set in boiling water meant. A few things need translating, and one ingredient is missing entirely.
- The coffee-pot in boiling water is a double boilerSet a heatproof jug or small saucepan in a pan of simmering water, or use a proper bain-marie. Milk and chocolate scorch fast over direct heat, which is exactly what this arrangement avoids.
- "Grated chocolate" means unsweetened"Grated chocolate" most likely means plain, unsweetened chocolate -- cakes of ground and pressed cocoa liquor were the usual form grated for drinking, though sweetened chocolate was also on the market. Three heaping tablespoons grated is roughly 1 to 1.5 oz. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, finely grated, or a bar of 90-100% cacao.
- There is no sugar in the recipePresumably it was expected to be added at table, to taste. Made as written with unsweetened chocolate the result is bitter. Add 2-4 tablespoons of sugar to the pot if you want it drinkable straight.
- New milkFresh whole milk, not skimmed and not soured. The cream-and-milk variant given in the parentheses makes a richer cup and is worth taking.
- Make the paste properlyGrated chocolate stirred straight into hot milk clumps. Work it to a smooth slurry with a few spoonfuls of cold milk first, exactly as directed, then stir that in.
- "Boil two or three minutes" means a bare simmerOver a water bath the milk will never reach a rolling boil, which is the point. Two or three minutes is long enough to dissolve the chocolate and drive off the raw taste; longer and you will get a skin on top.
- Froth it before servingThe recipe does not ask for it, but whisking hard for fifteen seconds off the heat, or using a stick blender, will raise a foam. Viennese drinking chocolate was commonly finished with whipped cream.
- YieldOne quart makes four generous cups, or six small ones if you are serving it after dinner in the Continental manner.
- The word "season" at the endAn orphaned word, possibly the tail of a line lost in composition. If you take it as an instruction, season with sugar and, if you like, a piece of vanilla bean or a strip of cinnamon steeped in the milk.
Drinking chocolate reached Vienna through the Habsburg court in the seventeenth century, by way of Spain, and by the nineteenth century the city's coffee houses served it alongside coffee as a matter of course — thick, milky, and crowned with Schlagobers, whipped cream. That is what the name promises here: not the Spanish style thickened with cornmeal, but the milk-based Austrian cup. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Marysville, Ohio and first published in 1877, grew out of a church fundraising cookbook put together by a group of local women, and was a thoroughly American household book; the appearance of a Vienna recipe among its drinks says something about how far European café habits had travelled into the Midwestern middle-class parlour. The closing remark — that good chocolate needs good materials — was pointed advice in a decade when adulterated cocoa, cut with starch, brick dust or worse, was a real and widely reported problem on both sides of the Atlantic.