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Cocoa Syrup
2 cups water 2 cups sugar 1 cup cocoa 1/2 teaspoon salt Put water and sugar into saucepan; stir until dissolved; boil 5 minutes; mix cocoa with cold water to make a paste and add to boiling water and sugar; boil slowly for 10 minutes; add salt. When cold put into bottle or glass jar in refrigerator. Take 2 tablespoons of syrup for each glass or cup of milk. Serve with whipped cream.
Served either hot or iced, this is a nourishing and delicious beverage. Tea Water for tea should be freshly heated and just boiling. Teas are of different strength, but a safe rule is 1 teaspoon dry tea to 1 cup water. Scald teapot; put in dry tea and cover for 1 minute. Add boiling water and cover closely. Allow it to stand 3 to 6 minutes and strain off into a second hot pot.
A plain sugar-and-cocoa syrup of the soda-fountain type, meant to be kept in the refrigerator and stirred into milk. It works exactly as written; the only vague point is the water used to slake the cocoa.
- The cocoa pasteThe recipe never says how much cold water to use for the paste. Start with about 1/2 cup, enough to make a smooth pourable slurry with no dry lumps, and add it slowly to the boiling syrup so it does not seize. Lumps that go in whole will not break up later.
- Which cocoa"Cocoa" here means unsweetened cocoa powder, and in an American kitchen of this period that would most often have been natural (non-alkalized) cocoa, though Dutch-process was already on sale. Dutch-process will give a darker, milder, less fruity syrup; either works, but they do not taste the same.
- Cup of cocoa by weightA cup of cocoa powder runs roughly 3 to 3.5 oz (85-100 g) depending on how it is scooped. Sifting before measuring makes both the volume and the paste more predictable.
- Watch the second boilTen minutes of slow boiling with cocoa in it is where this goes wrong. Use a heavy pan, keep it at a lazy simmer, and stir the bottom constantly; cocoa solids scorch and the whole batch will taste burnt.
- Strain itPour the hot syrup through a fine sieve into the jar. Even a well-stirred batch leaves a little grit, and straining is the difference between smooth and chalky in a cold glass of milk.
- Yield and strengthExpect somewhere in the region of 2 1/2 to 3 cups of syrup, depending on how hard it boils; at the stated 2 tablespoons per cup of milk that is roughly 20 to 24 servings. Some will find that ratio mild and prefer 3 tablespoons.
- KeepingCover tightly and refrigerate. The high sugar concentration preserves it well, but treat a month as the outside limit and discard it if the surface shows any mold or the syrup smells fermented.
- The tea noteThe paragraph on tea is a separate entry that ran on in the original page, not part of the syrup. Its method still holds for black tea: scald the pot, 1 teaspoon of leaf per cup, 3 to 6 minutes, then decant off the leaves so it cannot stew.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the great American promotional cookbooks of the early twentieth century, and it padded its baking pages with a general household section. A cocoa syrup belongs to the soda-fountain era: soda fountains served chocolate syrup from the late nineteenth century onward, and home cooks copied it. Cocoa powder itself was a nineteenth-century industrial product, the defatted cake left after cocoa butter was pressed from the bean, and by the 1920s it was cheap enough to buy by the cup rather than the spoonful. The claim that the drink is "nourishing" is period advertising language, reflecting the era's confidence that milk plus sugar equaled sound nutrition.