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Chocolate (Tablespoons sugar cups scalded)
4 tablespoons sugar 3 cups scalded milk 1 cup boiling water salt Melt two squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate, add sugar, salt and boiling water; boil two minutes, add scalded milk and beat with Dover egg beater to prevent scum from torming. Serve very hot.
A plain hot chocolate built on unsweetened chocolate rather than cocoa powder, with a short boil of the chocolate paste before the milk goes in. The book places it oddly among the frozen dishes, but it is meant to be drunk very hot.
- The chocolateLowney's Premium was an unsweetened baking chocolate. Squares of baking chocolate of the period were usually about 1 ounce, so 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate, chopped, is the likely equivalent. The 4 tablespoons of sugar are all the sweetening the drink gets, so taste and add more if you are used to modern cocoa.
- SaltNo quantity is given. A pinch, about 1/8 teaspoon, suits these quantities; it sharpens the chocolate rather than making the drink salty.
- The two-minute boilBoiling the chocolate, sugar and water together dissolves the sugar and swells the starch in the cocoa solids, which is usually credited with helping the finished drink hold together instead of settling out. Skip it and the drink is more likely to come out thin and speckled.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to just below a simmer, until it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F. Scalding is often explained as a way of checking souring organisms in raw milk; with pasteurised milk it simply gets the drink hot without a second long heating.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-crank rotary beater. A wire whisk, a milk frother or a short burst with an immersion blender does the same job of aerating the surface so a skin of coagulated milk protein cannot set.
- YieldAbout a quart, or four generous cups. It thickens slightly as it stands; whisk again before pouring.
Chocolate as a hot drink was made from ground, unsweetened chocolate long before cocoa powder was common, and the technique here — boil the chocolate with water first, then let down with milk — echoes the Spanish and Mexican practice of whisking chocolate into water until frothy. Walter M. Lowney's Boston firm was one of the large American chocolate manufacturers of the 1890s and 1900s, and Lowney's Cook Book, compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907, was a promotional cookbook of the kind that both taught technique and named the maker's product in every relevant line. The instruction to beat the drink to prevent scum is a reminder that skin forms on any heated milk, and that cooks were used to fighting it.