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Mix four tablespoons Lowney's Breakfast Cocoa with one cup boiling water; boil two minutes; add one and one half cups boiling water which has been mixed with one half cup condensed milk and a few grains salt; bring to the boiling point and serve with or without whipped cream. If condensed milk has not been sweetened, add two tablespoons of sugar to the cocoa. freshly boiled water Tea 1 teaspoon tea for each cup Scald an agate-ware teapot; put in as many teaspoons tea as cups required. Cover with as many cups of boiling water as there are teaspoons of tea. Serve immediately.
Two beverages run together on one page: a cocoa built on the old trick of boiling the powder into a paste first, and a bare-bones black tea method. Both work, but each has a step worth reading closely.
- Boil the cocoa paste, and mean itThe two minutes of hard boiling with only one cup of water is the hinge of the recipe. Cocoa powder carries starch that needs heat and moisture to swell; skipping it leaves a thin, chalky drink with the raw, dusty edge of dry powder.
- Breakfast cocoa"Breakfast cocoa" is a legal grade, not a brand flavour: unsweetened cocoa with at least 22 percent cocoa butter. Any good natural unsweetened cocoa stands in; Dutch-process will give a darker, milder cup and slightly less thickening.
- Condensed milk, sweetened or notThe note about unsweetened condensed milk is the tell. What the book calls unsweetened condensed is what a supermarket now sells as evaporated milk. Use sweetened condensed and leave out the sugar; use evaporated and add the two tablespoons.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups of liquid plus a half cup of milk, so roughly three cups, or two generous mugs. Salt is not optional in flavour terms even at a few grains; it sharpens the chocolate.
- Agate-ware teapotAgate-ware is enamelled steel, and the enamel surface was presumably part of its appeal, holding neither tannin nor metallic flavour the way bare tin and some pottery could. A glazed ceramic or glass pot does the same job. Scalding it is not fussiness: a cold pot drops the water well below brewing temperature.
- "Serve immediately"Taken literally this gives coloured water; more likely the pot was expected to sit while cups were fetched. Give black tea three to five minutes and pour off the leaves. Green tea wants water around 175F rather than a full boil.
- Freshly boiled waterThe insistence on freshly boiled water is sound. Water reboiled repeatedly loses dissolved air and makes a flat cup, and water held below the boil will not extract properly.
Lowney's Cook Book came out of the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa maker that competed with Baker's and Hershey in the early 1900s, and like other manufacturer cookbooks of the period it served to put the company's tins into daily use. That explains the shape of this page: the cocoa is specified down to the brand, while the tea beside it gets no brand, no steeping time and barely a paragraph. The condensed-milk instruction dates it too. Canned milk, sweetened and unsweetened, was a household staple long before reliable home refrigeration, and a recipe like this one covers both versions because a reader might have either can on the shelf. Boiling the cocoa before adding milk was a common step in American cookery of the period, and it survives in the "cocoa paste" step of hot chocolate recipes still.