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Baker's Chocolate
Scrape fine about one square of a cake, which is an ounce; add to it about an equal weight of sugar; throw these into a pint of perfectly boiling milk and water, of each one-half, and immediately mill or stir them well for two or three minutes, until the chocolate and sugar are quite dissolved; it is then ready for the table. Some think that 10 or 12 minutes' boiling improves it. Chocolate should never be made but when it is intended to be used immediately, for by suffering it to become cold, or boiling it again, the flavor is injured, the oily particles of the cocoa are separated, and rise to the surface, and will never incorporate pleasantly again. ICED COCOA (for one cup) 2 level teaspoonfuls Baker's Breakfast Cocoa 6 level teaspoonfuls granulated sugar 1/2 cup boiling water 1/2 cup ice-cold milk Stir the cocoa and sugar together; add the boiling water and stir until boiling; let boil two or three minutes, then set aside to chill. When ready to serve stir in the milk. (for four cups) 1/4 cup Baker's Breakfast Cocoa 3/4 cup granulated sugar 2 cups boiling water 2 cups ice-cold milk ICED CHOCOLATE (for four cups) 2 squares Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate 2/3 cup granulated sugar 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 cup boiling water 3 cups ice-cold milk Melt the chocolate over boiling water; add the sugar, salt and boiling water and stir until boiling, let boil five or six minutes, then set aside to chill. When ready to serve mix with the milk. One or two tablespoonfuls of vanilla ice-cream may be added to each cup after the chocolate has been poured into it.
CHOICE RECIPES BY MISS MARIA PARLOA SPECIALLY PREPARED FOR WALTER BAKER & CO., LTD. AND REDUCED BY MISS FANNIE MERRITT FARMER TO LEVEL MEASUREMENTS TO MEET
Three drinks in one entry: a hot chocolate made from scraped block chocolate, and two iced versions built on a cooked syrup base. The measurements are already level, thanks to Fannie Farmer, so the arithmetic holds up.
- The chocolate itselfBaker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened chocolate, sold in one-ounce squares. Any unsweetened baking chocolate substitutes directly; do not use a bittersweet bar, which will throw the sugar quantities off badly.
- "Mill or stir"To mill is to work the drink with a molinillo, the turned wooden whisk spun between the palms. A wire whisk or a stick blender does the same job — the point is to emulsify the cocoa butter into the liquid so it does not separate.
- The hingeEverything in the first recipe hangs on serving it at once. Cocoa butter and cocoa solids only stay suspended while the drink is hot and agitated; let it cool and reheat and the fat rises as a slick that will not go back in.
- On the 10 or 12 minutesThe writer reports this as an opinion of others, and it is worth treating as such. Prolonged boiling of a milk-and-water mixture scorches the milk solids and dulls the chocolate; two or three minutes of vigorous stirring is enough.
- Why the iced versions boilThe cocoa or chocolate is boiled with water and sugar before the milk goes in, which disperses the cocoa and makes a syrup that stays smooth when chilled; skip it and the drink is likely to taste gritty.
- SweetnessSix level teaspoons of sugar to a cup is two tablespoons — very sweet by current taste, and the four-cup iced cocoa is sweeter still at 3/4 cup. Cut by a third and taste before chilling.
- The saltThe quarter teaspoon in the iced chocolate is not seasoning in any obvious way; it sharpens the chocolate flavour and cuts the sugar. Keep it, and consider adding a pinch to the cocoa versions too.
- YieldThe first recipe makes a pint, so two cups. The iced recipes state their yields, and the syrup bases are set aside to chill before the milk is added, as the recipe directs.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate concerns in the United States, and from the late nineteenth century onward it published small recipe booklets to persuade American households that chocolate belonged in the kitchen and not just the apothecary. This one carries two of the most recognisable names in period American cookery: Maria Parloa, founder of a Boston cooking school and a prolific writer of domestic manuals, and Fannie Merritt Farmer, whose insistence on level rather than heaped measurements is the reason these quantities can be followed at all. The hot chocolate reads much older than the iced drinks that follow it — the instruction to scrape a cake and mill it belongs to a tradition of drinking chocolate that reaches back through eighteenth-century Europe to Mesoamerica, though the frothing stick itself is generally reckoned a later, Spanish-colonial addition rather than a Mesoamerican one. The iced cocoa and iced chocolate are the newer arrivals, part of the soda-fountain enthusiasm that spread through American towns around the turn of the twentieth century, and the suggested spoonful of vanilla ice cream in each cup is a fountain touch dropped into the home kitchen.