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Miss M. E. Robinson's Recipes
Plain Chocolate
1 ounce or square of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar, 1/8 a teaspoonful of salt, 1 pint of boiling water, 1 pint of milk. Place the chocolate, sugar and salt in the agate chocolate pot or saucepan, add the boiling water and boil three minutes, stirring once or twice, as the chocolate is not grated. Add the milk and allow it time to heat, being careful not to boil the milk, and keep it closely covered, as this prevents the scum from forming. When ready to serve turn in chocolate-pitcher and beat with egg-beater until light and foamy.
A plain drinking chocolate built on unsweetened baking chocolate, thinned half-and-half with water and milk. The whole point is in the last line: the beating is what makes it worth drinking.
- Baker's Premium No. 1This was the company's plain unsweetened chocolate, sold in cake form and scored into squares. Baker's Unsweetened Chocolate is the direct descendant. Do not substitute semi-sweet or cocoa powder without adjusting the sugar.
- The agate chocolate potAgate means agateware, enamelled steel or iron; the enamel gave a nonreactive surface. Any nonreactive saucepan works. A dedicated chocolate pot is not needed.
- Why boil the water three minutesThe recipe says it plainly: the chocolate is not grated. The boil is there to melt a solid square and disperse the cocoa solids and cocoa butter into a smooth base. If you chop or grate the chocolate first, a minute of hard whisking off the heat will do the same.
- Do not boil the milkBoiled milk throws a skin of coagulated protein and takes on a cooked flavor. Bring it to roughly 180F, steaming with no bubbles breaking, and keep the lid on as instructed.
- The beating is the hingeOne ounce of chocolate in a quart of liquid is thin by modern standards. Whisking air into it just before serving is what gives body and foam. Do it hard, in the serving pitcher, and pour at once, since the foam collapses within a few minutes.
- SaltAn eighth teaspoon in a quart is not seasoning you will taste as salt; it sharpens the chocolate. Keep it.
- YieldAbout a quart, or four cups. For a richer drink use two squares rather than one and leave the sugar as it is.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts traced its chocolate mill back to the 1760s and 1770s, and by the turn of the twentieth century was the best-known chocolate name in the United States. The Choice Recipes booklets were promotional cookery pamphlets, with contributions solicited from the leading domestic-science writers of the day, and they exist to teach American households what to do with a hard, bitter square of unsweetened chocolate. The final beating to a foam is the surviving trace of a much older habit: Mesoamerican cooks frothed chocolate by pouring it between vessels before it was thought fit to drink, and the turned wooden molinillo, a later Spanish colonial device, did the same work with a whisking motion. The American cook simply reached for an egg-beater instead.