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Chocolate Frappé
Prepare chocolate as for drinking; then chill; freeze soft and serve with whipped cream. 1 quart clear coffee
Two lines of instruction and a dangling quart of coffee: this is a loose-leaf page written for a cook who already knew what drinking chocolate and a hand-crank freezer were. Here is what the shorthand assumes.
- The stray line"1 quart clear coffee" appears to have nothing to do with the chocolate frappé; it reads as an ingredient line stranded from a neighbouring recipe, most likely a coffee frappé. Ignore it.
- "Chocolate as for drinking"Period drinking chocolate was generally made from unsweetened block chocolate, melted with sugar and a little water into a smooth paste, then thinned with hot milk and beaten until frothy. The recipe specifies no quantities, so scale to taste; cocoa powder will give a thinner result.
- Sweeten past the point that tastes right warmCold blunts sugar and chocolate flavour sharply. A hot chocolate seasoned perfectly at drinking temperature will taste flat frozen, so add noticeably more sugar and a good pinch of salt before chilling.
- "Freeze soft" is the whole recipeA frappé is deliberately stopped short of ice cream: churned or stirred only until it is a coarse, spoonable slush that still slumps in the glass. In an ice-cream machine that is roughly half the usual churn time; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 20-30 minutes for about two hours.
- Chill thoroughly firstWarm liquid put into a freezer canister melts the surrounding ice and produces coarse, gritty crystals. Refrigerate the chocolate until it is properly cold, several hours or overnight, before freezing.
- The creamSoft whipped cream, lightly sweetened or not at all, spooned over the top. Heavy cream at 36 percent or above whips to the right texture.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield; a quart of chocolate would make roughly six small servings. Serve in stemmed or footed glasses with a spoon, straight from the freezer, as a frappé loses its texture quickly at room temperature.
Frappé is the French past participle of frapper, to strike, used of drinks iced or shaken with ice, and by the early twentieth century American cookbooks had largely settled it on the half-frozen middle ground between a chilled drink and a water ice. Recipes like this one belong to the soda-fountain era, when syrups and hot chocolate served over a counter were reproduced at home with a hand-crank freezer. A loose-leaf format of this kind is itself a period artifact: pages were meant to be removed, propped up and replaced, and clipped recipes added, which may account for terse instructions and the occasional stranded ingredient line. The instruction to prepare "chocolate as for drinking" assumes a cook who needed no further direction.