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Breakfast Cocoa
1 1/2 tablespoons prepared cocoa 2 cups boiling water 2 tablespoons sugar 2 cups milk Few grains salt Scald milk. Mix cocoa, sugar, and salt, dilute with one-half cup boiling water to make smooth paste, add remaining water, and boil five minutes; turn into scalded milk and beat two minutes, using egg-beater, when froth will form, preventing scum, which is so unsightly; this is known as milling.
A straightforward cooked cocoa in the Fannie Farmer manner, where the cocoa is boiled with water before the milk goes in. The whisking at the end is not decoration -- it is what keeps a skin from forming.
- "Prepared cocoa"Most likely the plain unsweetened cocoa powder sold in tins as a breakfast beverage, though the term was also used of cocoa treated with alkali or cut with starch. Modern Dutch-process or natural cocoa both work; drinking-chocolate mixes already contain sugar and milk powder and will throw the proportions off.
- Boil the paste, not the milkCocoa powder carries some starch, and the five-minute boil in water was understood to cook it out. Cooks of the period held that cocoa treated this way tasted less raw and settled less in the cup; any actual thickening at this proportion is slight.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk just to the point where bubbles ring the edge of the pan, around 180F, then take it off the heat. It should not boil.
- MillingBeat hard for the full two minutes after combining. The foam it raises sits on the surface and stops the protein skin the book calls unsightly; a milk frother or immersion blender does the same job faster.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of sugar for four cups of liquid is restrained by current taste. Adjust in the paste stage, before the milk, so it dissolves fully.
- YieldAbout four cups, or four modest breakfast servings. It reheats, but will need re-milling.