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Vienna Chocolate
3 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Vanilla Chocolate, Few grains salt, 1 quart milk.
Put milk in double-boiler, add chocolate broken in pieces, and stir until chocolate has melted and milk has reached the scalding point. Add salt, and beat until frothy. Serve in chocolate cups, with whipped cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla.
If the sweetened chocolate is not at hand, unsweetened may be used in its stead, with the addition of one-third cup of sugar and one teaspoon vanilla.
A simple scalded-milk drinking chocolate from a Walter Baker promotional booklet. The only technical demands are not boiling the milk and getting enough air into it before serving.
- The chocolateWalter Baker's "Vanilla Chocolate" was a sweetened cake chocolate flavored with vanilla, as the recipe's own fallback line implies. Three ounces of a good bittersweet bar to a quart of milk works; the recipe's own fallback of unsweetened chocolate plus a third cup sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla is the more reliable route today.
- Scalding pointThat is about 180F, when the surface shivers and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge. The double boiler is there precisely so the milk cannot catch or boil over, and boiling will give you a skin and a flat, cooked-milk flavor.
- Beat until frothyThe recipe names no implement; a rotary egg beater would have been the likely household tool. A stick blender or a milk frother does the same job in seconds; the froth collapses fairly quickly, so beat immediately before pouring.
- Few grains saltRead this as a pinch, at most a scant 1/8 teaspoon for the full quart. It sharpens the chocolate rather than making the drink taste salted.
- Chocolate cupsChocolate cups were generally smaller than teacups, on the order of 4 to 5 ounces, so a quart would fill six to eight; the recipe gives no yield of its own. The drink is rich and the whipped cream adds bulk.
- The creamSweeten lightly and whip only to soft peaks so it settles onto the surface rather than sitting on it as a stiff lump. A spoonful per cup, added at the table.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising: the formulas call for Baker products by name, here the company's sweetened Vanilla Chocolate. The "Vienna" label was commonly attached to drinking chocolate served under a cap of whipped cream, a usage generally linked to the Viennese coffeehouse habit of crowning hot drinks that way, so the name appears to have signaled the cream more than any particular Austrian method. Earlier American chocolate was often made with water and thickened, whereas this recipe is all milk, gently scalded, whipped to a foam, and served in small cups.