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Desserts
Rice Pudding Boiled Custard Tapioca and Fruit Pudding Bread Pudding Apple Betty with Cream Junket Fruit, raw or cooked Gingerbread or plain cake Measure one pound of cocoa. Add as many cups of sugar as there are of cocoa. Add three cups of water. Cook until thick and glossy. Pour into jelly glasses or glass jars. Cover and set When cocoa is wanted for lunch use, prepare according to the following recipe: away. 1 cup milk for each child 1½ tablespoons of the cocoa mixture Heat the milk scalding hot in a double boiler. Add the cocoa mixture. Beat well and serve. More sugar may be used in the mixture if it is found that the children desire it sweeter. NOTE. The tables of height and weight for girls and boys, pages 450, 451, afford a standard for comparison only. In comparing a child's height and weight with the table, the type of build should be taken into account. A child of slender type might be under weight, and one of thick-set, stocky type might be over weight, and yet both be normally healthy. A slight variation is no cause for alarm, but if the difference amounts to ten per cent, however, corrective measures should be taken.
The page opens with a bare list of suggested lunch desserts, then gives a genuine recipe: a cocoa syrup made up in quantity and stored, then stirred into hot milk a cup at a time. It is the same principle as bottled chocolate syrup.
- The proportions need reading carefullyA pound of cocoa powder is roughly 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 cups depending on how it packs, so "as many cups of sugar as there are of cocoa" means about five cups of sugar to three cups of water. That is a very large batch of stiff syrup; a quarter of the recipe is more manageable for a household.
- Cook until thick and glossyThis is the hinge. The mixture must simmer long enough for the sugar to dissolve fully and the cocoa solids to hydrate, or the syrup stays gritty and separates in the jar. Expect a few minutes at a low boil with constant stirring, and watch it closely as cocoa scorches on the bottom of the pan.
- Storage"Cover and set away" meant a cool larder. A cocoa syrup at this sugar concentration is fairly stable, but keep it refrigerated and use it within a few weeks; if it smells fermented or shows any surface growth, discard it.
- Scalding milk in a double boilerScalding means heating to just below boiling, around 180F, when the surface shivers and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. The double boiler is there to stop milk catching and skinning, which matters less with a heavy modern pan over low heat.
- Strength per cup1 1/2 tablespoons of syrup to a cup of milk is a mild drink by current tastes, which is presumably why the recipe invites more sugar. Adjust the syrup rather than adding sugar at the cup.
- JunketListed among the desserts, this is milk set with rennet into a soft custard-like curd. It requires rennet tablets or liquid animal rennet, still sold but no longer a pantry staple.
- YieldA full batch makes several cups of syrup, enough for upwards of fifty cups of cocoa; the phrasing "1 cup milk for each child" points to a school or institutional kitchen rather than a family.
Cocoa syrup made up in bulk and kept in jelly glasses belongs to the era of the hot school lunch, which spread through American cities and consolidated rural schools in the first decades of the twentieth century. Before cafeterias were standard, a teacher or a mothers' club often provided one hot item at midday, and hot cocoa was the obvious choice: it used milk, which reformers were pressing on children as the most efficient food available, it needed only a pot and a stove, and a concentrate meant no measuring of cocoa and sugar in a schoolroom. The dessert list above follows the same logic, favoring milk-and-starch puddings, custards and junket over rich pastry. The appended note on height and weight tables offers the tables only as a standard for comparison, and says nothing of lunches or cocoa; what it suggests about the purpose of such meals is inference rather than statement.