Chocolate, to Make
INGREDIENTS. Allow oz. of chocolate to each person; to every oz. allow 1/2 pint of water, 1/2 pint of milk.
Make the milk-and-water hot; scrape the chocolate into it, and stir the mixture constantly and quickly until the chocolate is dissolved; bring it to the boilingpoint, stir it well, and serve diserve directly with white sugar. Chocolate prepared with a mill, as shown in the engraving, is made by putting in the scraped chocolate , pouring over it the boiling milk-and-water, and milling it over the fire until hot and frothy. 0 e MILL.
This is drinking chocolate made from a solid block of unsweetened chocolate scraped into hot milk and water, not from cocoa powder. It is thinner and less rich than modern hot chocolate, and it is sweetened at the table rather than in the pan.
- The quantity per person is unclearThe ingredient line has lost its fraction and reads only "oz. of chocolate to each person". Comparable drinking-chocolate recipes tend to fall somewhere in the region of 1/2 to 1 oz of solid chocolate per serving, but the original figure cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- What "chocolate" meant hereA hard cake or block of ground cacao, unsweetened or barely sweetened, sold to be grated. The nearest modern equivalent is 100% cacao baking chocolate or a very dark bar of 85% and above; ordinary eating chocolate will make the drink cloyingly sweet before the sugar is added.
- Half a pint of each is a full pint per ounceA British half-pint is 10 fl oz, so each ounce of chocolate is being carried by roughly 20 fl oz of liquid. That is a large, thin cup by current standards. Reduce the liquid or increase the chocolate for something closer to modern drinking chocolate.
- Scrape, do not chopScraping the block with a knife or grating it gives fine shavings that dissolve before the liquid boils. Chunks sink, scorch on the base of the pan and leave a gritty drink.
- The hinge: constant stirring to the boilCocoa solids settle and catch quickly. Keep the whisk or spoon moving the whole time, and take the pan off the heat as soon as it reaches boiling point; held at a boil the milk skins and the drink tastes stewed.
- The millA chocolate mill, or molinillo, is a turned wooden shaft with loose rings, spun between the palms to froth the drink in its pot. A small balloon whisk or a milk frother does the same job.
- Sugar at the tableWhite sugar was handed round rather than stirred in, so each drinker sweetened to taste. Expect to want a teaspoon or more per cup with genuinely unsweetened chocolate.
Drinking chocolate reached Europe from Mesoamerica by way of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and for most of its history in Britain it was a drink rather than a confection: chocolate houses opened in London in the 1650s alongside the first coffee houses. The pressing of cocoa butter out of the bean in the nineteenth century gave cooks the free-flowing cocoa powder that gradually displaced the scraped block, but Victorian household books kept both methods side by side, and Beeton's page assumes the reader still owns a cake of chocolate and a mill to froth it with. The mill itself is an unbroken survival of the Mexican molinillo, which came north with the drink and stayed in European kitchens for three centuries.