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Breakfast Cocoa
2 tablespoons Lowney's Break- 2 tablespoons sugar 2 cups boiling water fast Cocoa teaspoon salt Mix two tablespoons Lowney's Breakfast Cocoa, two tablespoons sugar, one eighth teaspoon salt; add two cups boiling water gradually; when smooth, boil five minutes; add two cups scalded milk, beat with a Dover egg beater until frothy.
A straightforward cocoa paste-and-boil method from a chocolate company's own promotional cookbook. The one thing to hold onto is the five-minute boil of the cocoa and water before any milk goes in.
- Why boil five minutesCocoa powder carries starch and cell-wall material that needs sustained wet heat to swell and disperse; that is what turns a gritty suspension into a smooth drink. Boiling milk from the start would scorch it, so the water stage does the work first.
- The salt figureThe ingredient column reads "teaspoon salt" while the method says one eighth teaspoon. Take the method: an eighth of a teaspoon for four cups. The column has almost certainly lost a fraction in typesetting.
- Lowney's Breakfast CocoaAn unsweetened cocoa powder rather than a sweetened drink mix, and most likely natural rather than Dutch-processed, though the recipe does not say. Any modern unsweetened natural cocoa works; Dutch-process cocoa will give a darker, milder, less fruity cup.
- Scalded milkHeat to about 180F, just until the surface shivers and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. In 1907 scalding also served to knock back bacteria in unpasteurized milk; today it is simply about getting the milk hot without boiling over.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A small whisk, a milk frother, or a brief burst with an immersion blender all do the job. The frothing is not decorative -- it lightens the body and is the difference between this and flat cocoa.
- YieldFour cups, so four modest breakfast cups or two large mugs. Serve at once; the foam collapses within a few minutes and the drink will skin over as it stands.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like Baker's and Hershey's booklets of the same era it existed to sell tins of cocoa by teaching households what to do with them. "Breakfast cocoa" was a defined trade term rather than a serving suggestion: it meant the richer grade of cocoa, one that in the United States eventually carried a regulatory minimum cacao fat content of not less than 22 per cent. The pressing technique descends from the hydraulic press developed by the Van Houten family in the Netherlands in the 1820s, which is what made powdered cocoa -- as opposed to the older, greasy drinking chocolate ground from whole beans -- a practical breakfast article at all. The Dover beater named in the method was the standard American rotary egg beater of the period, common enough that a cookbook could assume one on every hook.