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Mrs. Ewing's Creamy Cocoa
Stir together in a saucepan half a cup of Walter Baker & Co.'s Breakfast Cocoa, half a cup of flour, half a cup of granulated sugar and half a teaspoonful of salt. Add gradually one quart of boiling water and let the mixture boil five minutes, stirring it constantly. Remove from the fire, add a quart of boiling milk, and serve. If desired a spoonful of whipped cream may be put in each cup before filling with the cocoa.
The proportions given will make delicious, creamy cocoa, sufficient to serve twelve persons. The flour should be sifted before it is measured.--By Mrs. Emma P. Ewing, author of "The Art of Cookery."
A cocoa for twelve, thickened with flour rather than enriched with cream -- which is what the "creamy" of the title actually means. It is institutional cooking-school thinking, and it scales cleanly.
- Flour is the whole ideaHalf a cup of flour to two quarts of liquid is a light binding, enough to give the drink body and a coating texture on the tongue without turning it into a pudding. Cream would have done the same job at several times the cost.
- Sift before you measureThe recipe says so explicitly in its last line, and it matters: sifted flour measures something like a fifth lighter than flour scooped from the bag. If you would rather weigh, half a cup of sifted flour is about two ounces, or 60g.
- Mix the four dry things firstCocoa, flour, sugar and salt stirred together dry is the anti-lump step, and the boiling water then goes gradually onto that mixture rather than the other way round.
- Boil the flour out -- this is the hingeFive minutes at an actual boil, stirring the whole time. Cut it short and the drink tastes of raw flour, which is the one failure this recipe is prone to.
- Both liquids go in hotWater boiling, milk boiling. A quart of cold milk into a hot, starch-thickened base drops the temperature sharply and can leave the texture grainy.
- Natural cocoaWalter Baker's Breakfast Cocoa was a plain, non-alkalised cocoa. Dutch-process will taste darker and smoother and less fruity; either works, but they are not the same drink.
- Scale and skinTwo quarts finished, twelve cups, as the recipe states. Quarter it for three. Standing off the heat it will skin over, so whisk it again before pouring, or do as the recipe suggests and put the whipped cream in the cup first.
Emma Pike Ewing, born on a Broome County farm in New York in 1838, was one of the most institutionally serious of the contributors gathered in this booklet. She ran the School of Cookery at the Chautauqua Assembly, opened her own cooking school in Chicago in 1880, taught at Iowa Agricultural College, and in 1887 became head of the new Department of Domestic Economy at Purdue -- the first woman to lead a department there. The Art of Cookery: A Manual for Homes and Schools, the book her credit line names, is a teaching text, and this recipe reads like one: it serves exactly twelve, it uses cheap flour to buy the mouthfeel of cream, and it tells you to sift before measuring because it expects to be followed by someone who has not cooked before.