Home › Beverages › Chocolate III
Chocolate III
2 ozs. sweetened chocolate Few grains salt 4 cups milk Whipped cream Scald milk, add chocolate, and stir until chocolate is melted. Bring to boiling-point, mill, and serve in chocolate cups with whipped cream sweetened and flavored.
A four-ingredient drinking chocolate that depends entirely on technique: the chocolate must be finely divided and the milk must be frothed before it goes to the table.
- Sweetened chocolateThis means a solid sweetened eating or baking bar, not cocoa powder and not modern semisweet chips, which carry added fat and emulsifiers. A 2 oz bar of plain dark chocolate around 50-60% cacao is the closest match; taste and add a teaspoon or two of sugar if it drinks too bitter.
- Grate or chop firstTwo ounces of chocolate dropped whole into hot milk will sit on the bottom and scorch before it melts. Grate it coarsely or chop it fine so it disperses in seconds.
- ScaldingScalded milk is heated to about 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge and steam rises, well short of a rolling boil. Do it over moderate heat and stir, or use a double boiler if your pan runs hot.
- "Bring to boiling-point"Take it just to the point where the surface trembles, then pull it off. Milk held at a true boil throws a skin, catches on the pan and turns the drink flat and slightly cooked-tasting.
- MillTo mill is to froth the chocolate, traditionally with a wooden molinillo twirled between the palms. A wire whisk worked briskly for fifteen or twenty seconds, or a stick blender pulsed once or twice, gives the same head of foam.
- SaltA few grains means a small pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon. It is there to sharpen the chocolate, not to season the milk, and more will read as salty against the sugar.
- Chocolate cups and yieldChocolate cups were narrow and small, smaller than a coffee cup, though capacities varied. Four cups of milk is about 32 fl oz, so on the order of six to eight small cups, or four generous mugs.
- The creamSweeten and flavor the whipped cream separately before spooning it on, as the recipe directs. Vanilla is the default; a period kitchen might equally have used a drop of almond extract or a grating of cinnamon.
Drinking chocolate reached European kitchens well before eating chocolate did, and the vocabulary of this recipe still carries that older world: the English chocolate mill, and the verb to mill, are usually associated with the Spanish molinillo, the turned wooden swizzle used to raise foam on chocolate, a step long considered essential to the drink. By the time American domestic-science writers were numbering their chocolate recipes I, II and III, sweetened chocolate could be bought ready-made, and the cook's job had narrowed to scalding milk properly and not boiling it. Where numbered chocolate recipes appear together, the plainer versions tend to precede the richer milk-and-cream ones; this one, milked to a froth and served in small cups under sweetened whipped cream, sits at the company end of that scale.