Home › Canning and Preserving › Cocoa
Cocoa
4 teaspoons cocoa Little cold milk 4 cups hot milk 4 teaspoons sugar Mix the cocoa and sugar, and stir together with a little cold milk until smooth. Stir this mixture into the hot milk; boil two minutes and serve.
A plain drinking cocoa in the pre-instant style: dry cocoa slaked to a paste, then cooked briefly in milk. The method is worth keeping even if the proportions strike a modern palate as thin.
- The stray line at the end"2 cups sugar 2 cups water" does not belong to the cocoa; it is the opening of some other recipe (the proportions would suit a sugar syrup, but nothing on the page says so). Ignore it.
- Make the paste properlyThis is the hinge. Cocoa powder will not disperse in hot liquid — mixing it with the sugar first, then working in cold milk a spoonful at a time to a smooth slurry, is what keeps the drink from turning grainy with floating clumps.
- What "cocoa" meantUnsweetened cocoa powder, most likely natural (non-alkalised) rather than Dutch-process, though the recipe says only "cocoa." Dutch-process will give a darker, mellower cup; either works here, as there is no leavening to react with.
- The two-minute boilNot decorative. Brief cooking hydrates the cocoa's starch and thickens the drink very slightly, which is what distinguishes cooked cocoa from powder stirred into hot milk. Keep it at a bare boil and stir, as milk scorches on the pan bottom quickly.
- SweetnessA teaspoon each of cocoa and sugar per cup is restrained by current standards. If you want it sweeter, add the extra sugar before the milk goes in, while it is still a paste.
- YieldFour cups, serving four as written, or two generous mugs.
Drinking chocolate reached the American household in this thin, milk-based form largely in the second half of the nineteenth century, after pressing methods made it possible to remove much of the cocoa butter and sell a defatted powder that would mix with liquid. Before that, chocolate was drunk as a rich, fatty, often spiced preparation made from ground whole beans. Tinned cocoa powder was an ordinary pantry staple by the later part of the century, and cocoa was widely promoted as a wholesome, temperate drink for children and invalids, which may be why so many books of the era print it in the plainest possible terms, with no vanilla, salt or spice. Its appearance under "Canning and Preserving" is presumably a filing accident rather than anything to do with the recipe.