Cocoa
To one pint milk and one pint cold water add three tablespoonfuls grated cocoa. Boil fifteen or twenty minutes, milling or whipping as directed in foregoing recipe. Sweeten to taste, at the table. Some persons like a piece of orange-peel boiled with it.--Mrs. S. T.
A plain nineteenth-century breakfast cocoa, thinned with an equal quantity of water and sweetened at the table rather than in the pot. The long boil belongs to the ingredient the recipe assumes, not to modern cocoa powder.
- What "grated cocoa" wasCocoa then commonly came as a pressed cake or block of partly de-fatted cocoa, grated like chocolate, or as coarse nibs. It was gritty and starchy and benefited from prolonged boiling to soften and disperse. Modern cocoa powder is far finer and disperses much more readily.
- The boil is the thing to changeFifteen to twenty minutes of boiling with modern powder gives a scorched, slightly bitter drink and risks a skin and a scalded pan. Whisk the cocoa to a paste with a little of the cold water, add the rest and the milk, and bring just to a simmer for two or three minutes.
- QuantityThree tablespoons of cocoa to a quart of liquid is thin by current taste — a little over two teaspoons per cup. Grated cocoa cake was probably less concentrated than today's powder, so a stronger drink means more cocoa rather than a longer boil.
- MillingThe recipe refers back to a "foregoing recipe" for the milling, which implies a chocolate mill or whisk, twirled between the palms to raise a foam. A wire whisk or an immersion blender does the same job.
- Orange peelUse a strip of zest from an unwaxed orange, added while the milk heats and lifted out before serving. Any white pith turns the drink bitter over a long infusion.
- Sweetening at the tableThe recipe is explicit about it, plausibly so that one pot could serve a household of differing tastes. If sweetening in the pot, start with a tablespoon of sugar per quart and a pinch of salt, which sharpens the chocolate flavour.
- YieldA quart of liquid, or four small cups — teacup portions, not mugs.
Cocoa entered American households as a cheaper, less rich alternative to drinking chocolate: the pressing of cocoa butter out of the ground bean, industrialized in the Netherlands in the early nineteenth century, left a cake that could be grated into water or milk without the greasy slick that plain chocolate gave. By the 1870s, when Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled from contributed recipes, packaged cocoa was a staple grocery item and appeared at breakfast beside coffee and tea, particularly for children and invalids. The instruction to sweeten at the table, and the initials in place of a name, are both characteristic of the book — it is a collection of household practice from named Virginia contributors, and the recipes assume a cook who already knows what a chocolate mill is and how a pot of it should look.