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Chocolate Syrup
1/3 cup Walter Baker & Co.'s Breakfast Cocoa, 2 cups sugar, 1 cup boiling water.
Mix cocoa and sugar thoroughly. Add water gradually while stirring constantly, bring to the boiling point, and let boil five minutes. Cool, add one-half tablespoon vanilla. Store in glass jar and keep in a cold place.
A straightforward cocoa syrup for sodas and milk drinks, made at a much higher sugar-to-cocoa ratio than most modern versions. A few notes on the cocoa itself and on keeping it.
- Breakfast CocoaWalter Baker's Breakfast Cocoa was a natural (non-alkalized) cocoa powder with a relatively high fat content, sold chiefly as a beverage powder, though the company's own booklets also used it in baking. Any unsweetened natural cocoa works; Dutch-process will give a darker, milder, less fruity syrup.
- Mix dry first, and mean itCocoa is hydrophobic and will raft on hot water in stubborn lumps. Whisking it thoroughly into the sugar before any liquid goes in is the whole trick — the sugar crystals keep the particles separated until they wet through.
- The five-minute boilThis is what sets the finished thickness. Boiling hard for five minutes concentrates the syrup considerably; a gentle simmer will leave it thin. It thickens further as it cools, so judge consistency cold, not hot.
- Vanilla off the heatAdding the half tablespoon of vanilla after cooling preserves the aromatics that would boil away. If your extract is a strong one, a teaspoon or two may be enough.
- "A cold place"Written for a larder or icebox. Refrigerate it. At this sugar concentration it keeps several weeks, but discard it at any sign of mold or fermentation rather than trusting the sugar alone.
- SweetnessSix parts sugar to one part cocoa by volume is sweeter than most commercial syrups today. Cutting the sugar to a cup and a half gives a more chocolate-forward syrup, though it will also be thinner and keep less well.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate makers in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising in the guise of a cookbook, with recipes calling for the company's own products by name. Booklets like this one, distributed free or for a few cents, were a standard promotional form around the turn of the twentieth century and did a great deal to move cocoa from the medicine chest and the breakfast cup into American baking. A syrup of this kind belonged to the soda-fountain era: bottled chocolate syrup was not yet a grocery staple, so households that wanted chocolate milk or a chocolate soda at home made the syrup themselves and kept a jar of it on the ice.