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Chocolate Syrup
2 ounces chocolate 2 cups boiling water 2 tablespoons vanilla 4 cups sugar Put the chocolate in a saucepan, and add the water gradually, stirring all the time. Add the sugar, and stir till it begins to boil; boil three minutes, strain, cool, and add two tablespoons vanilla.
A plain chocolate syrup for milk drinks and sodas, built on a 2:1 sugar-to-water ratio. Nothing here is difficult, but a few details in the wording matter.
- The chocolate"Chocolate" in a book of this period means unsweetened baking chocolate, generally sold in wrapped cakes marked off into squares of roughly an ounce. Use 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped; cocoa powder is not a straight substitute, as it carries far less cocoa butter.
- Add the water graduallyThis is the hinge. Chocolate seizes and goes grainy if flooded with liquid at once. Start with a few tablespoons of the boiling water, work it to a smooth paste over low heat, then let the rest in by degrees.
- Vanilla off the heatThe vanilla is listed with the ingredients but added last, after cooling, and that order is deliberate: vanilla's aromatics are volatile and boiling them off wastes them. Two tablespoons is a generous amount by modern habit, and reads as intentional in a syrup this sweet.
- Boil three minutes, and no longerThree minutes is enough to dissolve the sugar fully and thicken the syrup slightly; boiled longer it concentrates further and is more likely to crystallize in the jar. Watch it: 4 cups of sugar in 2 cups of water foams and climbs, so use a deeper pan than you think you need.
- Why strainUnsweetened chocolate leaves fine gritty solids and the occasional unmelted fleck. Straining through a fine sieve is what makes the difference between a syrup that pours clean into milk and one that settles.
- Yield and useAbout 3½ to 4 cups. Figure 2 tablespoons to a glass of cold milk, or the same into hot milk for cocoa. Kept in a covered jar in the refrigerator it holds for several weeks; sugar at this concentration is largely self-preserving.
- If it crystallizesA syrup this saturated may throw sugar crystals after a week or two. Warming the jar gently to redissolve them deals with it; a little corn syrup added at the start may help discourage them.
Chocolate syrup belongs to the soda-fountain era rather than the confectioner's, and its appearance in a meatless cookery book is a reminder that such books had to cover the whole day's table, beverages included. Chocolate syrup is often associated with the American drugstore fountain, and home versions like this one were made up in the kitchen. The method reflects the raw material available: cakes of unsweetened chocolate, scored into ounces, which had to be melted and thinned by hand. Dutch-processed cocoa powder was on the market by then, but the solid cake remained the household standard for drinking chocolate, and recipes of the period commonly specify it by weight in ounces rather than by volume.