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Chocolate
Chocolate, when obtained genuine, is made from the berry of the cacao tree, mixed with a little cinnamon, vanilla, and sugar. It is a most agreeable and nutritious beverage. It is much used in Spain. That which is sold in England is too often a mixture of flour and treacle, with a very small quantity of the real article mixed in it, but there is no difficulty in obtaining the genuine article if the proper price be paid for it. Scrape as much chocolate as may be required into equal quantities of hot milk and water. Stir it until it is dissolved, then put it in the saucepan, and make it quite hot, stirring it all the time. It must not boil up, or it will be oily. Sweeten and serve. The quantity to be used depends on the strength wanted. Generally speaking, one ounce of chocolate may be used for one pint of milk and water. Where chocolate is regularly used, it is much better to have a proper chocolate mill, so that it may be served hot and frothy. Time, ten minutes. Probable coast, from 1s. to 1s. 6d. per pound. Cheap chocolate should be avoided. Allow one ounce for each person.
A working method for drinking chocolate from a block, written when chocolate was still something you scraped rather than poured. The instructions are sound; only the raw material has changed.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. Once the liquid boils the cocoa butter separates and rises, and the drink turns greasy on the tongue. Bring it to the point where steam rises and the surface trembles, then take it off.
- What "chocolate" meant hereA hard cake of ground cacao already sweetened and usually spiced with cinnamon and vanilla, sold by the pound and grated as needed. The nearest modern equivalents are a Mexican-style drinking chocolate tablet, or a good dark bar of 60-70 per cent, chopped rather than scraped.
- Adjust the strengthOne ounce (28 g) to a pint (20 fl oz, about 570 ml) of half milk and half water gives a thin drink by present-day expectations, and assumes a sweetened cake. With unsweetened cacao mass or a 70 per cent bar, 1.5 to 2 oz per pint is closer to what most people now want.
- Milk and water, not all milkThe recipe calls for equal parts, which gives a lighter drink than milk alone; all milk gives something richer and heavier, closer to a modern hot chocolate.
- The chocolate millProbably a frothing stick of the molinillo type: a turned wooden shaft, sometimes with loose rings, spun between the palms in the pot to raise a head of foam. A small whisk works, or a few seconds with a stick blender off the heat.
- SweeteningAdd sugar at the end, once you have tasted, since the sweetness of the chocolate itself is the variable. If the cake or bar is already sweetened it may need none.
The complaint that opens this entry is not incidental grumbling. Victorian chocolate was routinely padded with starch, flour, treacle and sometimes red earth to bulk out the expensive cacao and absorb its fat, and the analyses published in The Lancet in the 1850s made cocoa adulteration a matter of public argument; the advice to pay the proper price and avoid cheap chocolate reflects that period directly. The Spanish association is equally rooted: chocolate reached Europe through Spain in the sixteenth century and was drunk there, spiced and frothed with a molinillo, for generations before it became common in England. The instruction to scrape a solid cake into hot liquid belongs to a time when chocolate was primarily a drink and secondarily a confection. Prices of 1s. to 1s. 6d. a pound put it firmly among the household's more considered purchases.