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Brandy Cocoa
4 tablespoons Lowney's Breakfast Cocoa 4 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon brandy + cup boiling water 4 cups scalded milk teaspoon salt Mix four tablespoons Lowney's Breakfast Cocoa, four tablespoons sugar, and one fourth cup boiling water; when smooth, add four cups scalded milk and cook in double boiler twenty minutes; add one tablespoon brandy and salt; beat and serve; garnish with beaten cream.
A hot cocoa spiked at the end with a spoonful of brandy. The ingredient list has suffered in transcription — fractions have dropped out — so read the method paragraph rather than the list.
- The missing fractionsThe list reads "+ cup boiling water" and "teaspoon salt"; the method makes clear the water is one fourth cup. The salt quantity is lost in transcription; a scant quarter teaspoon suits the volume, but the original does not say.
- Breakfast CocoaA high-fat unsweetened cocoa powder; the name refers to the cocoa butter left in, and this style was generally natural rather than Dutch-processed. Any unsweetened cocoa works; Dutched cocoa will give a darker, rounder, less fruity cup.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to about 180F, just until it shivers and a skin forms, not boiled. With modern pasteurized milk the step is no longer necessary for keeping quality, but it does speed the cooking and helps the cocoa dissolve smoothly.
- The paste comes firstCocoa, sugar and the quarter cup of boiling water must be worked to a genuinely smooth paste before any milk goes in. Cocoa starch that meets milk before it meets water will stay gritty however long it cooks.
- Twenty minutes in a double boilerNot padding. The long gentle cook hydrates the cocoa starch and thickens the drink slightly; it also keeps the milk from catching. A saucepan over low heat will do if you stir, but the double boiler is genuinely more forgiving.
- Brandy goes in off the heatAdded at the end, as written, so the aroma survives. A tablespoon across four cups is a seasoning rather than a fortified drink — expect scent more than strength.
- Beaten creamWhipped cream, unsweetened and soft, spooned on at the table. "Beat" the cocoa itself with a whisk just before serving; the froth is part of the point.
- YieldAbout four and a quarter cups, so four modest cups or six small ones.
- Filed under Frozen DishesAn oddity of the book's arrangement rather than an instruction: this is served hot.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard, was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to a large family of American cookbooks issued to sell a branded product — the cocoa is specified by name throughout. Spirit-laced cocoa of this kind sat at the respectable end of the invalid-cookery and late-evening-refreshment tradition, where a spoonful of brandy was understood as restorative rather than festive; brandy turns up on the same footing in beef tea and in milk punch. That such recipes appear in a manufacturer's promotional book, more than a decade before national Prohibition, is a fair measure of how unremarkable the practice then was.