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French Cocoa
4 teaspoons cocoa 2 teaspoons sugar 1 cup boiling water 1 cup scalded milk Follow the directions in the preceding recipe, boiling three minutes.
A two-cup drink built on the standard cocoa method of the period: dissolve the cocoa and sugar in boiling water, boil the syrup briefly, then add hot milk. The missing steps come from the recipe that preceded it in the book.
- The method it points back toPresumably: mix the cocoa and sugar dry, stir in the boiling water gradually to a smooth paste, boil that syrup three minutes, then add the scalded milk and serve at once. The milk goes in after the boil rather than before.
- Why boil at allBoiling the cocoa in water for three minutes helps hydrate the starch in the cocoa and may thicken the drink slightly, which distinguishes it from cocoa merely stirred into hot milk.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to about 180F, until a rim of bubbles forms at the edge of the pan, not boiling. In the period it may also have served as a safety step for unpasteurized milk; today it simply gets the milk hot without a skin forming.
- The cocoa itselfPeriod cocoa is natural (non-alkalized) powder, acidic and light brown. Dutch-process cocoa will work but tastes rounder and darker and needs a little less sugar to taste balanced.
- SweetnessTwo teaspoons of sugar to two cups of liquid is very restrained by current taste. Judge after the milk goes in and add more if wanted; the sugar is not structural here.
- FrothBeating the finished cocoa with a whisk for a few seconds before pouring lightens the body and helps keep the powder in suspension, though the recipe does not call for it.
- YieldTwo cups of liquid, so two modest servings or one large one.
Cocoa recipes of this kind fill the beverage chapters of American cookbooks from the 1890s through the 1920s, when tinned cocoa powder from firms like Baker's and Hershey's had made the drink cheap and domestic. The label "French" was applied loosely, sometimes to versions cut half-and-half with water rather than made entirely with milk and sometimes to cocoa finished with whipped cream, in the way that "French chocolate" appeared on menus of the era; the association is traditional rather than a matter of any French original.