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Hot Chocolate
2 squares chocolate 2 cups cold water 3 tablespoons sugar 2 cups milk Melt chocolate; add sugar and cold water and heat to boiling point, cook 15 minutes in a double boiler. Add milk and heat again. Remove from flame as soon as boiling point is reached. Serves 6.
Tea Use 2 level teaspoons tea to 2 cups of water Use freshly boiling water, scald teapot, put in tea and pour on boiling water in proportion given. Cover and keep in warm place, but where the tea will not boil, for 3 to 5 minutes to draw. If it cannot be used at once, pour off the tea and discard the leaves. An earthen teapot is preferable. Serves 2.
A standard early twentieth-century cocoa formula: a chocolate syrup is cooked first with water, then milk is added at the end so it never has to boil hard. The long cooking is the whole point of the method.
- "Squares" of chocolateA square means one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for 2 oz. Bittersweet or semisweet bar chocolate will work but is already sweetened; cut the sugar back by about half if you use it.
- Three tablespoons sugar is restrainedWith unsweetened chocolate, 3 tablespoons across four cups of liquid gives a drink most modern palates read as barely sweet. Taste before the milk goes in and adjust; a pinch of salt sharpens the chocolate flavour more than extra sugar does.
- The 15 minutes mattersLong, gentle cooking in the water is what gives this method its body and smoother texture; the small amount of starch in cocoa solids may account for some of it. Keep the full time, and stir now and then.
- Boiling point, then the double boilerThe text reads as bringing the chocolate, sugar and water to a boil and then cooking it 15 minutes in a double boiler; it does not say whether that first heating is over direct heat or already over water. Water in the lower pan should simmer, not boil hard.
- Do not let the milk boilOnce the milk goes in, pull the pan the moment steam rises and the surface trembles. Boiled milk throws a skin and takes on a scalded, faintly sulphurous flavour.
- Froth itBeating the finished chocolate for a few seconds with a whisk or immersion blender lightens the texture and prevents a skin forming while it stands. This was traditionally done with a wooden molinillo.
- YieldFour cups of liquid divided six ways is roughly two-thirds of a cup each, sized for small cups rather than mugs. For six full mugs, increase by half.
Drinking chocolate reached European kitchens long before eating chocolate did, and recipes like this one preserve the older logic: chocolate is dissolved in water first, as it was in Mesoamerica and in early Spanish practice, with milk treated as a later enrichment. By the time this book was printed, standardized one-ounce squares of unsweetened baking chocolate were widely available, and a two-stage method -- cook with water, finish with milk -- was one common way of avoiding both scorching and separation. The quarter-hour cooking may reflect a period when chocolate was coarser than the modern product; the step survives in some hot chocolate recipes because it improves body.