Chocolate
A nutritious beverage can be made by scalding one pint of milk, adding to it two tablespoons of Larkin Corn Starch, moistened in two tablespoons of the milk reserved from the pint. Cook ten minutes and add one ounce of unsweetened chocolate with two tablespoons of sugar, dissolved in one cup of boiling water. Add a pinch of Larkin Table Salt and cook for ten minutes. Take from the fire and add one-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract. Serve with or without whipped cream.
A cornstarch-thickened cocoa, closer to a thin drinking chocolate than to modern hot cocoa. The one thing to get right is the heat: milk plus starch plus chocolate will scorch on the bottom of a thin pan in seconds.
- Use a heavy pan and stirTwo ten-minute cooking stages over direct heat will catch and burn unless the pan is heavy and you stir more or less continuously. A double boiler is the safer route, though it will need the full twenty minutes to thicken properly.
- Larkin brandsLarkin Corn Starch, Table Salt and Vanilla Flavoring Extract were the mail-order house brands the book was written to sell. Any cornstarch, fine salt and vanilla extract behave identically.
- Scalding milkBring the pint to about 180F, when steam rises and bubbles form at the edge, not to a rolling boil. Reserve the two tablespoons for the starch slurry before heating.
- The chocolateOne ounce unsweetened chocolate means baking chocolate, roughly one square of the old moulded bars. Chop it before adding it to the cup of boiling water so it disperses; two tablespoons of sugar against an ounce of unsweetened chocolate gives a drink that is only just sweet by current taste.
- Cook the starch outThe second ten minutes is not padding. Cornstarch needs sustained heat past gelatinisation to lose its raw, chalky flavour, and the added cup of water has cooled and thinned the base.
- Vanilla off the heatAdded at the end, as directed, so the alcohol and aromatics do not boil away.
- YieldAbout three cups after the added water, less whatever evaporates over the two cooking stages. It thickens further as it cools and will form a skin; whisk before pouring.
This is a beverage from the era when cocoa was sold as a food rather than a treat, and the word "nutritious" in the first line is doing commercial work: chocolate drinks were promoted to households as a strengthening alternative to tea and coffee, particularly for children and invalids. Cooks here worked with unsweetened cake chocolate, which is high in cocoa butter and separates readily in hot milk; a starch-bound base kept the drink smooth and gave it the body that a modern cook gets from richer milk or more chocolate. The recurring Larkin brand names mark this out as the kind of volume the Larkin Company of Buffalo and its competitors distributed to customers of their mail-order soap and grocery clubs, where recipes doubled as a shopping list of the firm's own goods.