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Walter Baker & Co.'s Breakfast Cocoa
3 tablespoons Breakfast Cocoa, 3 tablespoons sugar, Few grains salt, 1 cup boiling water, 3 cups milk.
Scald milk in double-boiler. Mix cocoa, sugar, and salt and add water gradually, that mixture may be perfectly smooth; bring to boiling point and let boil three minutes. Pour into scalded milk and beat two minutes, using a wire whisk or Dover egg beater, thus preventing scum, which is so unsightly. This process is called milling.
A standard turn-of-the-century cocoa: a boiled paste of cocoa, sugar and water thinned with scalded milk, then whipped to a froth. The three-minute boil is the step that matters.
- Use plain unsweetened cocoa"Breakfast Cocoa" was cocoa powder with much of the cocoa butter pressed out — essentially today's unsweetened natural cocoa. Do not substitute a sweetened drinking-chocolate mix; the sugar is already accounted for.
- Natural, not DutchedWalter Baker's Breakfast Cocoa was not alkalised. Dutch-process cocoa will work but gives a darker, milder, less fruity cup, and the recipe's pinch of salt matters more with it.
- Don't skip the boilBoiling the cocoa paste for three minutes swells and cooks the starch in the cocoa, which thickens the drink slightly and keeps the solids in suspension instead of settling to the bottom of the cup. Cocoa stirred straight into hot milk tastes raw and separates.
- Add the water graduallyDry cocoa clumps on contact with liquid. Mix cocoa, sugar and salt dry, then work in the boiling water a spoonful at a time to a smooth paste before loosening it further.
- ScaldingScalded milk means heated to about 180°F, when it steams and forms a ring of small bubbles at the edge — not boiled. A double boiler prevents scorching; a heavy saucepan over low heat with attention does the same.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A wire whisk, a milk frother or a few pulses in a blender all achieve the "milling" — the froth is what keeps a skin from forming on the surface.
- YieldFour cups. It reheats poorly once milled; make it to order.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its origins to the chocolate mill started in 1765 by Dr. James Baker and the Irish chocolate-maker John Hannon, and by the late nineteenth century it was the best-known chocolate house in the United States. Booklets of Choice Recipes like this one were promotional literature, commissioned from well-known cooking-school authorities and given away or sold for a few cents, and they did a great deal to standardise how Americans made cocoa at home. "Breakfast cocoa" was a trade term for cocoa from which a large share of the cocoa butter had been pressed out — the technique generally traced to Coenraad van Houten's press in the Netherlands — leaving a powder light enough to drink at breakfast rather than the rich, fatty chocolate of earlier centuries. The word "milling" preserves an older practice still: Spanish and Mexican cooks froth chocolate with a turned wooden molinillo, and the Dover egg beater was simply the American machine-age version of the same idea.