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Mrs. Hill's Cocoa Frappe
Mix half a pound of cocoa and three cupfuls of sugar; cook with two cupfuls of boiling water until smooth; add to three quarts and a half of milk scalded with cinnamon bark; cook for ten minutes. Beat in the beaten whites of two eggs mixed with a cupful of sugar and a pint of whipped cream. Cool, flavor with vanilla extract, and freeze. Serve in cups. Garnish with whipped cream.--Janet McKenzie Hill--Ladies' Home Journal.
A frozen cocoa ice for a crowd -- nearly a gallon of it -- scalded with cinnamon bark and lightened with whipped cream and beaten egg white. The quantities are institutional and the egg white is a problem.
- The egg whites may never be cookedThe whites are beaten, folded into a cupful of sugar and a pint of whipped cream, and that whole aerated mixture is beaten into the cocoa base. The recipe does not say whether the base is still hot, and folding whipped cream into a boiling liquid would collapse it, so in practice it is not. The mixture is then cooled and frozen, and freezing is not a kill step.
- Two ways to make it safelyUse pasteurised egg white, which is sold in cartons and behaves identically here. Or add the plain beaten whites to the base while it is still at a simmer, hold it there a couple of minutes, then cool it and fold the whipped cream in at the end -- which is the better order anyway, since it keeps the cream aerated.
- "Half a pound of cocoa"By weight, not volume: about two and a quarter cups of cocoa powder. This is Walter Baker's Breakfast Cocoa, a plain natural cocoa. Mixed with three cupfuls of sugar and only two cupfuls of boiling water it makes a very stiff paste before it is let down into the milk.
- Cinnamon bark, not ground cinnamonA stick or two infused into the scalding milk and then lifted out. Ground cinnamon will not strain out and leaves the frappe gritty.
- It is a frappe, not an ice-creamThree and a half quarts of milk against a single pint of cream makes a lean mixture that freezes hard and granular rather than smooth. That is the intention -- a frappe is meant to be coarse and icy. Churning it in a modern machine will give something closer to a sorbet; still-freezing it and raking it with a fork every half hour is nearer the period result.
- ScaleThis makes something over a gallon and was written for a reception, not a family. Quarter it -- a scant quart of milk, three-quarters of a cup of cocoa, and a single egg white -- and the proportions still work.
Janet McKenzie Hill founded and edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine and wrote widely for the popular press, and this recipe reaches the booklet at second hand: the credit line names both her and the Ladies' Home Journal, so Walter Baker was reprinting a magazine recipe by a known authority rather than commissioning one. Her name appears twice on this stretch of pages. The frappe itself belongs to the era of the reception and the church social, when a single vessel of something cold and sweet had to serve thirty people; the word comes from the French for struck or chilled, and in American usage of the period it meant a coarse, granular water- or milk-ice rather than the smooth churned cream that had the word ice-cream to itself.