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Baker's Breakfast Cocoa
Into a breakfast cup put a small teaspoonful of the powder, add a tablespoonful of boiling water and mix thoroughly. Then add equal parts of boiling water and boiled milk, and sugar to the taste. Boiling 2 or 3 minutes will improve it.
A single cup of cocoa built the old way: paste first, liquid after. The method still gives a smoother drink than dumping powder into hot milk.
- The hinge: make a pasteThe tablespoon of boiling water worked into the dry powder is the whole technique. Cocoa particles are coated in fat and will clump if flooded with liquid at once; a stiff paste wets them individually and the finished cup has no grit.
- "A breakfast cup"Roughly 8-10 fl oz, larger than a teacup. The recipe fills it with about half water and half milk once the paste is made, so figure 4 oz water and 4 oz milk for a standard mug.
- "A small teaspoonful"This is a weak modern cup. Baker's Breakfast Cocoa was sold unsweetened and finely ground; modern cocoa recipes commonly call for anything from a rounded teaspoon to a full tablespoon per cup. Start with two teaspoons if you want the drink to taste of chocolate.
- Breakfast CocoaThe name meant a cocoa pressed to remove much of the cocoa butter, so it was lighter than drinking chocolate made from whole ground cake. Any unsweetened natural cocoa powder stands in. Dutch-process will taste rounder and darker but less fruity.
- Boiled milkPeriod recipes routinely call for scalded milk, from an era before pasteurisation was universal. Heating it to just below a simmer is still worth doing for texture, but it is no longer a safety step with commercial milk.
- "Boiling 2 or 3 minutes will improve it"Genuine advice, not a relic. A short boil hydrates the starch in the cocoa and thickens the drink slightly. Watch it: milk climbs the pan fast once it moves, and a skin forms on standing that is best whisked back in.
- SugarThe recipe says only "sugar to the taste"; no quantity is given. One to two teaspoons per cup suits most palates with unsweetened cocoa; add it with the paste so it dissolves fully.
- YieldOne cup. Multiply straight up for a pot, but make the paste in the saucepan first rather than scaling in the cups.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was, by the firm's own long-repeated claim, the oldest chocolate concern in the United States, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was giving away small recipe booklets like this one to teach households what to do with its tins. "Breakfast Cocoa" was a product name as much as a description: cocoa pressed of a good part of its butter, which made it cheaper by weight, easier to digest by the nutritional thinking of the day, and suited to the morning cup rather than the rich evening chocolate of earlier centuries. Recipes of this kind did double duty as advertising, which is why the instructions are so brief and so confident about the proportion of water to milk; the company wanted its powder used in a way that made it taste right. The paste-first method they insist on here is often said to echo much older drinking-chocolate practice, though the connection is uncertain.