Chocolate
1 quart milk 2 ounces chocolate 2 tablespoons boiling water 1/2 tablespoon cornstarch 3 tablespoons sugar Pinch salt Mix the cornstarch with one-fourth cup of the milk. Put remainder of milk in double boiler. When the milk is scalded, stir in the cornstarch, and cook fifteen minutes. Grate the chocolate, and put it in a small saucepan; add sugar and water, and place the saucepan over hot water. Stir constantly until the mixture is smooth. Add the hot milk, and beat the mixture with an egg beater until frothy.
A thickened drinking chocolate of the sort common before instant cocoa mixes, made with unsweetened block chocolate and a little cornstarch for body. Serves four to six in small cups.
- The chocolate"Chocolate" here means unsweetened baking chocolate, not cocoa powder and not a sweetened bar. Two ounces of unsweetened chocolate to a quart of milk with three tablespoons sugar gives a dark, barely sweet drink; taste and add more sugar if you want something closer to modern hot chocolate.
- GratingGrating was the usual way to get block chocolate to melt evenly over hot water. Chopping it fine with a knife works as well.
- Double boilerBoth the milk and the chocolate paste are held over hot, not boiling, water. Scalded milk means about 180F, when steam rises and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge; do not let it come to a rolling boil or it will skin and scorch.
- The fifteen-minute cookThat long a hold is for the cornstarch, not the milk. Cornstarch needs to reach near-boiling to lose its raw taste and set its thickness, and in a double boiler that takes time. Five minutes of gentle direct-heat simmering with constant whisking does the same job, though the double boiler is more forgiving.
- Order of combiningThe hot milk goes into the chocolate paste, not the reverse. Adding it gradually while stirring keeps the paste from seizing into grains.
- FrothingAn egg beater aerates the drink and hides any slight graininess. A stick blender or a milk frother does it faster; whisk only until foamy, since overworking a starch-thickened liquid can thin it.
- SaltThe pinch of salt is not decorative. It sharpens the cocoa flavor noticeably in a low-sugar drink like this one.
Drinking chocolate is far older than eating chocolate, and recipes like this one preserve the earlier habit of treating chocolate as a beverage first. Through much of the nineteenth century American households commonly bought chocolate as unsweetened cakes to be grated, and cookbooks distinguished "chocolate" (the ground whole bean, cocoa butter included) from "cocoa" (much of the fat pressed out). The cornstarch gives the cup a body that milk and chocolate alone would not have.