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Chocolate, Viennese
1 quart milk 4 ounces vanilla chocolate 3 tablespoons boiling water 1 tablespoon sugar Scald milk in a double boiler. Grate the chocolate, and put it with the sugar and water in a small saucepan; heat over hot water, stirring until smooth. Stir this mixture into the hot milk, and beat thoroughly with an egg beater. Serve with whipped cream.
A drinking chocolate built on scalded milk rather than water, thickened only by the chocolate itself. The technique matters more than the quantities.
- Vanilla chocolateThis means a sweetened eating chocolate flavoured with vanilla, nearer a sweet dark bar than unsweetened baking chocolate. Use 4 oz (about 115 g) of a sweetened dark bar; if you substitute unsweetened chocolate you will need considerably more sugar than the single tablespoon given.
- Scalding, not boilingScald means heating the milk until it steams and a skin begins to form, roughly 180F. In a double boiler it will not scorch, which is the whole reason the original specifies one.
- Melt the chocolate over water, not on the burnerThe three tablespoons of boiling water let the grated chocolate and sugar melt down to a smooth paste. Add them at the start and stir smooth before any milk goes in; chocolate dropped straight into hot milk tends to clump.
- The beating is the pointWhisking the finished chocolate aerates it and emulsifies the cocoa butter into the milk, which is what gives the Viennese version its foam and keeps it from separating in the cup. A stick blender or a milk frother does the job of the egg beater.
- SweetnessOne tablespoon of sugar for a quart is barely sweet by current taste, on the assumption that the bar carries the sugar. Taste before serving and adjust.
- YieldA quart of milk makes four generous cups or six small ones. Serve in warmed cups with unsweetened whipped cream spooned on top rather than stirred in.
- Holding itIt will thicken and form a skin as it stands. Keep it over hot water, off direct heat, and whisk again just before pouring.
Vienna's claim on chocolate is a café claim: by the nineteenth century the city's coffee houses had established the habit of serving hot drinks crowned with unsweetened whipped cream, and the name Viennese on a chocolate or a coffee recipe in an English-language cookbook of this period generally signals nothing more precise than with whipped cream on top. The milk base rather than a water base is the other marker, and it is the richer, later style; earlier European drinking chocolate was more often chocolate beaten into water, sometimes with a wooden molinillo.