Chocolate
Scrape fine one square of Baker's chocolate (which will be an ounce). Put it in a pint of boiling water and milk, mixed in equal parts. Boil it ten minutes, and during this time mill it or whip it with a Dover egg-whip (one with a wheel), which will make it foam beautifully. Sweeten to the taste, at table.--Mrs. S. T.
A single-ounce block of unsweetened chocolate whisked into hot milk and water — the standard nineteenth-century drinking chocolate, unsweetened until it reaches the table.
- The chocolate"One square of Baker's chocolate" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, still sold in scored blocks of the same size. Cocoa powder is not a substitute here: the cocoa butter in the solid block is what gives the drink its body.
- Scrape it fineGrating or shaving the block matters more than it sounds. A whole square dropped into liquid sits at the bottom and scorches before it disperses.
- The ten-minute boilHold it at a bare simmer rather than a true rolling boil, and stir or whip throughout. Half the liquid is milk, and milk left to boil hard for ten minutes will catch on the pan bottom and taste burnt. The long cooking will thicken the drink slightly by reduction.
- MillingA "Dover egg-whip (one with a wheel)" is a hand-crank rotary beater. A modern rotary beater, a stick blender used in short bursts, or a milk frother all do the job; the foam is the point, and a plain fork will not raise it.
- Sweetening at tableUnsweetened chocolate at this strength is bracingly bitter. Expect to want two to three teaspoons of sugar per cup, and warn anyone served it that the sugar bowl is not decorative.
- YieldA pint of liquid, reduced a little in the boiling, gives about two cups or three small ones.
Drinking chocolate reached Virginia tables long before eating chocolate did, and this recipe catches the moment when both the chocolate and the equipment had become factory goods. Baker's, milled in Massachusetts from the late eighteenth century onward, sold unsweetened chocolate in the scored one-ounce squares the recipe assumes its reader will recognize without further explanation. The instruction to "mill it" is older than the tool named beside it: milling is generally understood to refer to the molinillo or chocolate mill, the turned wooden whisk rolled between the palms that came north with chocolate from Spanish America and was long the usual way to raise the foam considered essential to a properly served cup. Here the molinillo has been quietly replaced by the Dover rotary egg-beater, the crank-and-wheel gadget that spread through American kitchens in the last third of the nineteenth century and is named in this book as casually as a brand of flour. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, gathered by Marion Cabell Tyree, is full of these small collisions between an inherited technique and the newer hardware that had begun to replace it.