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Reception Chocolate
1 quart milk 1/2 cup cocoa 1/4 cup flour 1 quart water 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/8 teaspoon salt Mix dry ingredients and make a smooth paste with some of the water. Pour on the remainder of the water and boil slowly for fifteen minutes. Combine with the milk, bring to the boiling-point. Add vanilla. Serve with whipped cream. This is a very thick, rich cocoa.
A thickened cocoa built on a flour-and-water base, intended to be poured from a pitcher for a crowd rather than made by the cup. The whole method turns on cooking the flour out properly.
- Boil the flour base, and mean itThe fifteen minutes of slow boiling in water is not padding: it gelatinizes the starch and cooks off the raw-flour taste. Stir often and use a heavy pan, because a cocoa-flour slurry scorches on the bottom readily.
- Cocoa means unsweetened powderThe recipe assumes plain unsweetened cocoa, not drinking chocolate or a sweetened mix. Most American cocoa of the period was natural, though Dutch-process was also on sale; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder cup. If you use a sweetened mix, cut the sugar sharply.
- Sift the dry mixMix the dry ingredients first -- Cocoa, flour, sugar and salt combined dry, then wet with only some of the water to make a paste, is what keeps it smooth. Tipping in all the water at once invites lumps.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inDo not boil on after the milk goes in -- The recipe says bring to the boiling-point; take it off there rather than letting it boil away, or the milk skins over and the proteins catch on the pan.
- Vanilla goes in off the heatVanilla goes in last -- Added after the heating, as written, so the flavor is not driven off. Extract loses aroma quickly in a hot pot.
- YieldClose to two quarts, allowing for what boils away, so roughly twelve small punch-cup servings or eight mugs. It thickens further as it cools; thin with hot milk if it sets up too heavily on a buffet.
- Holding and servingKeep it in a double boiler or a low slow-cooker and stir occasionally, since the starch settles. The whipped cream is spooned onto each cup at the moment of serving, not stirred in.
"Reception" in a beverage title points to scale and setting: cocoa poured at afternoon receptions, church socials and club meetings, where a hostess needed a hot drink that could stand over heat without separating or thinning. The flour does the work here. Cocoa alone makes a thin drink, so a cooked starch base gave body and mouthfeel at the cost of a quarter cup of flour, with whipped cream on top doing the visible work. Cocoa powder was a nineteenth-century industrial product, made by pressing much of the fat out of ground cacao; note that this recipe is headed "chocolate" although it is made with cocoa.