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Mrs. Ewing's Creamy Chocolate
Mix together half a cup of sifted flour, half a cup of granulated sugar and half a teaspoonful of salt. Put into a saucepan half a cup of Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, finely shaved. Add one quart of boiling water, stir until dissolved, add the flour, sugar and salt, and boil gently, stirring constantly, five minutes. Then stir in a quart of boiling milk, and serve with or without whipped cream.--By Mrs. Emma P. Ewing, author of "The Art of Cookery."
The companion to Mrs. Ewing's Creamy Cocoa on the page before, made with block chocolate instead of cocoa powder. The two look almost identical on the page, but the order of operations is reversed, and that is the part worth noticing.
- The order is the opposite of the cocoa versionIn the cocoa, the dry ingredients go into the pan and the boiling water onto them. Here the shaved chocolate is dissolved in the boiling water first, and only then do the premixed flour, sugar and salt go in. Shaved chocolate needs open water to melt into; added to a floury slurry it stays in lumps.
- "Half a cup of chocolate, finely shaved"A volume measure for a solid, which is always approximate. Premium No. 1 was sold in one-ounce squares, and half a cup of shavings is roughly two to two and a half ounces. Weigh it if you can.
- It is unsweetened chocolateAll the sweetness in this drink is the half cup of granulated sugar. Substituting semi-sweet or a modern dark bar without cutting the sugar will make it cloying.
- Boil the flour outFive minutes at a gentle boil, stirring constantly, for the same reason as in the cocoa: undercooked flour is the one thing that will spoil it.
- Both liquids boilingQuart of boiling water to start, quart of boiling milk to finish. Cold milk at the end will dull the texture.
- A later printing adds vanillaWalter Baker reprinted this recipe with revisions, and the 1924 version stirs a teaspoonful and a half of vanilla in with the boiling milk. It is a real improvement against the flatness a flour-thickened drink can have, and it costs nothing to adopt.
- Richer than it looksBecause block chocolate carries its cocoa butter and cocoa powder has had most of it pressed out, this version is noticeably fuller than its cocoa twin at the same quantities. It also serves twelve.
Thickening a hot drink with flour to get the mouthfeel of cream without the cream was standard domestic-science practice, and Emma P. Ewing -- Chautauqua, Purdue, and the author of The Art of Cookery -- was teaching it to classes rather than to individual households, which is why both of her contributions here serve twelve. The two are also the only flour-thickened drinks in the booklet. Walter Baker's own house recipes a few pages earlier take a different line: the Hot Chocolate at the front uses a single teaspoonful of cornstarch and tells you to leave even that out if you want a thinner drink. Set side by side, the company's recipe and the cooking-school teacher's recipe show two quite different ideas of what a cup of chocolate should feel like.