Cocoa
2 tablespoons cocoa 2 tablespoons sugar 2 cups boiling water 2 cups boiling milk Put cocoa and sugar in saucepan; add 1/2 cup boiling water and cook, stirring constantly for five minutes. Add remainder of water, also milk, and cook five minutes longer. Serve with cream if desired. Serves 6.
A standard early twentieth-century cocoa built in two stages: a cooked cocoa-and-sugar paste first, then dilution with water and milk. The first stage is what separates this from stirring powder into hot milk.
- Cook the paste properlyThe five minutes with only half a cup of water is the hinge. Cocoa powder is roughly a tenth starch, and cooking it as a thick slurry hydrates that starch and drives off the raw, chalky taste. Skip it and the drink is thin and gritty.
- Which cocoaThis means plain unsweetened cocoa powder, natural or Dutch-process. It is not drinking-chocolate mix or hot cocoa mix, both of which are mostly sugar and milk solids and would make the sugar in the recipe redundant.
- Do not boil the milk"boiling milk" in books of this period often meant no more than scalded, just steaming with bubbles at the edge. Once the milk goes in, holding the pan at a bare simmer for the final five minutes is safer; a hard boil scorches milk solids on the pan bottom and the burnt flavour carries through the whole batch.
- The skinMilk proteins form a skin as the cocoa stands. Beat it with a whisk or milk frother just before serving, which both breaks the skin and gives the drink a foam head.
- Yield and sizingFour cups of finished cocoa for six servings works out to about five ounces each, a teacup rather than a mug. For six full mugs, scale the whole recipe by half again.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of sugar to four cups of liquid is restrained by current expectations. Taste after the milk goes in and adjust; adding sugar late dissolves fine in hot liquid.
- A pinch of saltNot in the original, but a small pinch added with the cocoa and sugar sharpens the chocolate flavour noticeably. Many books of the same period include it.