Chocolate
Cut into small pieces 1 square (1 ounce) unsweetened chocolate; add 1 tablespoon sugar and 2 tablespoons hot water. Boil all together till smooth; add gradually 2 cups scalded milk; cook in double boiler 5 minutes. If desired add 1/4 teaspoon vanilla. It may be made richer by using more chocolate. Serve with whipped cream.
A straightforward hot chocolate built on a cooked chocolate paste rather than a powder. The technique is the whole point: melting the chocolate with sugar and water first prevents the grittiness that comes from dropping chocolate straight into milk.
- The hinge: boil the paste until glossyChocolate, sugar and hot water should be cooked together over direct heat, stirring, until the mixture is thick and smooth with no specks. Adding milk before the paste is homogeneous leaves a gritty drink that will not recover.
- One square means one ounceBaking chocolate was sold in scored one-ounce squares, which is why old books count in squares. Modern bars are often 4 oz total; weigh 28 g of unsweetened chocolate rather than guessing at the score lines.
- Unsweetened, not bittersweetThis calls for 100% cacao baking chocolate. Substituting a 70% bar makes the drink markedly sweeter and thinner in chocolate flavour, so cut the sugar if you do.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to about 180F, just until a skin forms and bubbles ring the pan, not boiling. It is usually explained as a safety and keeping measure from the days of raw milk; with pasteurised milk it mainly speeds the final cooking and helps the paste disperse.
- Why the double boilerFive minutes over direct heat risks scorching the milk solids and catching the chocolate. Gentle indirect heat cooks the drink through without a burnt taste.
- Vanilla goes in lastAdd it off the heat, since held at temperature the aromatics cook off. The original does place it at the end, and as an option.
- YieldAbout two cups finished, so two modest cups or one generous mug. Doubling scales cleanly; keep the water-to-chocolate ratio the same so the paste still comes together.
- ServingThe recipe says only to serve with whipped cream; spoon it on top rather than stirring it in, and it need not be sweetened. A brief whisk before pouring raises a little foam.
Drinking chocolate reached American kitchens well before eating chocolate did, and the method here — chopping a hard cake of chocolate, cooking it to a paste, then letting it down with hot milk — echoes the eighteenth-century practice of preparing chocolate in a dedicated pot with a stirring rod, the Spanish-American form of which was the wooden molinillo used to raise a foam. Unsweetened baking chocolate sold in wrapped one-ounce squares was by then a familiar item in the American pantry, and the double boiler common equipment in a household cookery that prized scalded milk and gentle heat. The instruction that it "may be made richer by using more chocolate" fits the period's beverage chapters, which treated cocoa and chocolate as nourishing food as much as drink and often recommended them for children and invalids.