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Breakfast Cocoa with Condensed Milk
4 tablespoons Lowney's Breakfast Cocoa 2½ cups boiling water ½ cup condensed milk few grains salt
The book gives proportions only, with the method left to the general directions for cocoa elsewhere in the volume. Everything here is about how those proportions behave once you put them in a pan.
- Make a paste firstCocoa powder will not wet out in hot liquid. Stir the cocoa and salt with two or three tablespoons of the water to a smooth paste, then add the rest of the boiling water and simmer three or four minutes before the milk goes in. Skipping this leaves lumps and a thin, raw-tasting drink.
- Breakfast cocoa is a defined productThe term meant a cocoa with a high cocoa-butter content, at least 22 percent under later US standards, as against "cocoa" of lower fat. Any good unsweetened natural cocoa stands in; Dutch-process will give a darker, milder cup and slightly less body.
- Which condensed milkIn 1907 "condensed milk" ordinarily meant the sweetened kind, and half a cup of it with no other sugar in the list suggests that is what is intended. Unsweetened evaporated milk was also sold as condensed; if you use it the drink will need sugar.
- Do not boil after the milkSweetened condensed milk scorches readily and its sugars will catch on the bottom of the pan. Add it off the heat or at a bare simmer and bring back just to steaming.
- YieldAbout three cups. It is sweeter and richer than cocoa made with fresh milk, so a smaller serving is the right one.
- Salt"Few grains" is a pinch, well under an eighth of a teaspoon. It is there to lift the chocolate flavor, not to be tasted.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and like most manufacturer cookbooks of the era it exists to put the firm's tins to work in as many dishes as possible. The reliance on condensed milk rather than fresh is characteristic: canned milk, commercially condensed in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century onward, kept without ice and was often preferred in households where the morning milk was uncertain or where a beverage was wanted quickly. Cocoa itself had shifted by this date from a luxury to a daily breakfast drink, helped along by the press-and-alkalize methods that made the powder cheap, soluble and consistent enough to be sold with a printed recipe on the label.