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Hot Chocolate
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate 3 tablespoons sugar Small piece stick cinnamon 1 cup boiling water 3 cups hot milk 1 teaspoon vanilla Scrape the chocolate very fine; add the sugar, cinnamon and water; stir over the fire until the mixture is smooth; then add the milk. Return to the fire for a minute; remove; add the vanilla; beat well; pour into a chocolate pot and serve plain or with whipped cream.
A straightforward stovetop chocolate that gets its body from cooking the chocolate with water first, before any milk goes in. Four cups, so it serves four generously.
- Unsweetened chocolateTwo ounces of baking chocolate, 100% cacao, in bar form. Cocoa powder is not a substitute here at the same weight, since the cocoa butter is doing part of the work.
- "Scrape very fine"Grate or shave the bar rather than chopping it in chunks. Fine shavings dissolve in the boiling water without leaving gritty specks, which is the whole point of the water stage.
- The hinge: paste firstCook the chocolate, sugar and water together until genuinely smooth before the milk goes near it. Adding milk too early tends to leave the chocolate in flecks rather than a smooth body.
- Keep the milk below a boil"Return to the fire for a minute" means reheat, not boil. Boiled milk throws a skin and takes on a scalded flavour that fights the vanilla.
- The cinnamon stickThe recipe asks only for a "small piece." It steeps during the water stage and would be lifted out before serving — this is the older Spanish-style flavouring, not a modern garnish.
- "Beat well"An immersion blender or a small whisk does in seconds what a molinillo or egg beater did then. The foam is not decorative; whipping air in is what keeps the chocolate from tasting heavy.
- Chocolate potA tall narrow pot with a lid and a hole for the stirring stick. Any warmed pitcher works, but pour promptly — this separates as it stands and wants a stir before each cup.
Drinking chocolate arrived in Europe from Mesoamerica by way of Spain, where it was often spiced with cinnamon and chile; the cinnamon stick in this recipe is plausibly a survival of that older habit rather than a Victorian flourish. The technique of dissolving the chocolate in boiling water before adding milk appears in nineteenth-century American cookbooks and is sometimes said to give better results than dumping chocolate into hot milk. Mrs. Fryer's book, issued in the loose-leaf format that let a housekeeper add and reorder pages, dates from the era when a dedicated chocolate pot and a beater were ordinary equipment in a middle-class kitchen; why this page should be filed under "Canning and Preserving" is unclear.