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Breakfast Cocoa
1½ T cocoa ½ T sugar 2 C boiling water 2 C milk or cream Few grains of salt Scald milk. Mix together cocoa, sugar and salt and dilute with 2 C boiling water to make a smooth paste. Add remaining water and boil five minutes. Turn into scalded milk and beat two minutes with an egg beater. Serve at once with whole or cut marshmallows on top. Mrs. Madole. 12
A standard turn-of-the-century cocoa: a cooked syrup of cocoa, sugar and water, thinned with scalded milk and whisked to a froth. The recipe as printed has one internal contradiction worth sorting out before you start.
- The water is ambiguousThe ingredient list gives 2 cups boiling water, but the method says to use 2 cups for the paste and then "add remaining water." Almost certainly the intent is a few tablespoons of the boiling water to make a smooth paste, then the rest of the 2 cups. Treat the total as 2 cups.
- T and CT is a tablespoon and C is a cup in this book. So 1½ tablespoons cocoa and 2 tablespoons sugar to 2 cups water and 2 cups milk — a fairly lean cocoa by current taste. Half again as much cocoa is not out of place if you want it richer.
- Cocoa, not cocoa mixThis means unsweetened cocoa powder. Some cocoa of the period was Dutch-process (alkalized), which is milder and darker; the American brands were commonly natural cocoa, which reads sharper and more acidic. Either works here since there is no leavening involved.
- Why the paste step mattersCocoa powder will not wet out in hot liquid and floats in lumps. Working it with the sugar, salt and a small amount of boiling water first is the hinge of the recipe — skip it and you get gritty cocoa with a scum.
- The five-minute boilThis is deliberate, not carelessness: boiling the cocoa-water hydrates and swells the starch in the cocoa, which thickens the drink slightly and removes any raw, dusty taste. Keep the heat low enough that it does not reduce much.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, around 180F, and no further. It was originally done to knock back bacteria in unpasteurized milk; today it simply keeps the drink hot and helps the froth. Do not boil the milk after the cocoa goes in, or a skin forms.
- BeatingTwo minutes with an egg beater (a rotary beater in this period) builds the foam the instruction is after. A wire whisk or an immersion blender does the same job in less time.
- YieldAbout 4 cups, so four modest servings or two generous ones. It does not hold well — the foam collapses and the cocoa settles — which is why the original says to serve at once.
Cocoa as a hot breakfast drink was a Victorian and Edwardian fixture, promoted heavily by the big manufacturers as a wholesome alternative to coffee and tea, particularly for children and in temperance-minded households. The method here, paste first and then a boiled cocoa syrup finished with scalded milk, is the sort of thing taught in the domestic-science schools of the period and similar in kind to the instructions in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, so Mrs. Madole was passing along the standard instruction of her day rather than a family secret. The marshmallow on top is the American flourish: commercially made marshmallows became cheap and widely available around the turn of the century, and church-supper cookbooks put them on everything from cocoa to sweet potatoes.