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Vanilla Chocolate with Whipped Cream
1 cake (1/2 a pound) of Walter Baker & Co.'s Vanilla Sweet Chocolate, 4 cups of boiling water, Pinch of salt, 4 cups of hot milk This must be made in a double-boiler. Put the chocolate, boiling water and salt in upper part of the double-boiler. Stir and beat with a wooden spoon until the chocolate is dissolved and smooth. Add the milk and when thoroughly hot, strain, and serve with unsweetened whipped cream. More cooking will improve it.
A drinking chocolate built on a half-pound cake of sweetened, vanilla-scented dark chocolate — a product form that no longer exists on shelves, though it is easy to approximate.
- The chocolateWalter Baker's Vanilla Sweet Chocolate was a sweetened dark eating chocolate flavoured with vanilla, in the same broad family as a modern sweet or semisweet bar, though no exact cacao percentage can be assigned to it. Use 8 oz of sweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped, and add a teaspoon of vanilla extract at the end if you want the perfume the original carried.
- Why the double boilerChocolate with this much sugar scorches readily over direct heat, and a scorched batch tastes bitter all the way through. Gentle indirect heat also stops the milk catching on the pan bottom once it goes in.
- "More cooking will improve it"The line comes at the end, after the milk has gone in, and suggests the drink benefits from further gentle time over the water bath. Extra time thickens it slightly and rounds out the raw edge of the cocoa solids. It is not a throwaway line.
- Beating with a wooden spoonThe vigorous beating is emulsifying cocoa butter into water; a small whisk does it faster. Beat again just before serving, since the drink separates a little as it stands.
- StrainingWorth doing. It catches undissolved flecks and any skin formed on the milk, and it is the difference between a smooth cup and a gritty one.
- The saltA pinch is not seasoning for its own sake — it sharpens the perception of chocolate and cuts the sweetness of the cake. An eighth to a quarter teaspoon suits this quantity.
- Unsweetened creamDeliberate: the chocolate is already sweet, and plain whipped cream keeps the drink from cloying. Whip only to soft peaks so it settles into the surface rather than sitting on it.
- YieldEight cups of liquid, enough for eight generous mugs or a dozen small after-dinner cups.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate mill back to the 1760s partnership of John Hannon and Dr. James Baker, and by the late nineteenth century it was the best-known chocolate house in the United States. Choice Recipes was one of a long series of promotional booklets the company issued, with contributions solicited from well-known cookery teachers of the day — the recipes are genuine, but they are there to sell Baker products. Sweetened cake chocolate of this kind was sold in half-pound blocks, and drinking chocolate made from it was thicker and richer than the cocoa-powder version.