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Hot Chocolate for Two
1 oz. chocolate. 2 heaping teaspoons sugar. 1 cup boiling water. 1 cup hot milk.
Cook until smooth the sugar, chocolate and water and add hot milk. Marshmallows are pretty served on cup chocolate.
Meringues can also be used for decorations.
Sugar does not dissolve readily in cold fruit juice or cold tea; sugar sirup is better.
A two-cup drink built on unsweetened baking chocolate rather than cocoa powder, which is why it needs a boiling-water stage before the milk goes in.
- What "chocolate" means hereOne ounce of plain unsweetened baking chocolate, the kind sold in square blocks. Cocoa powder is not a direct substitute; it has had most of the cocoa butter pressed out and will behave differently in the water stage.
- The hinge: cook the paste firstChop or grate the chocolate before it meets the water, and keep whisking over direct heat until the mixture is glossy and completely smooth. Adding milk to unmelted lumps leaves you with a gritty drink and a film of separated fat.
- Sugar quantityTwo heaping teaspoons is modest against a full ounce of unsweetened chocolate; the result is dark and faintly bitter by current tastes. Taste after the milk goes in and adjust.
- Heating the milkHot, not boiled. Milk scalded hard picks up a cooked flavour and throws a skin; bring it just to steaming and pour it into the chocolate base.
- YieldAbout two cups total, so two modest servings rather than two mugs. Double it if you want proper mug-sized portions.
- The marshmallow and meringue noteBoth are optional garnishes. A spoonful of whipped cream does much the same job on the surface.
- The sugar-syrup sentenceThe last line is an unrelated household hint sitting at the foot of the recipe. It is sound advice for iced tea and fruit drinks, where a sugar syrup dissolves more readily than granulated sugar.
Mrs. Wilson wrote on cookery for the Ladies' Home Journal, and her cook book belongs to the era when American household writers were standardising measurements and portioning recipes for small families rather than large households. A drink scaled deliberately "for two" is itself a sign of that shift. The technique of dissolving the chocolate in boiling water before adding milk is older than the book and comes from the days when drinking chocolate was made from solid blocks that had to be broken down in liquid first; by this period tinned cocoa powder was steadily displacing block chocolate in the home, and recipes like this one preserve the older method.