Home › Chocolate › Chocolate and Cocoanut
Chocolate and Cocoanut
Mix the white of one egg with two tablespoonfuls of chocolate paste and one tablespoonful of grated cocoanut. Add boiling water and stir well. Put a spoonful of whipped cream on top and a little powdered cinnamon.
This is a single cup of fountain-style hot chocolate, thickened with egg white and given texture by grated coconut. The original assumes a soda fountain's stock of chocolate paste and gives no water quantity, so a few decisions are left to you.
- Chocolate pasteFountain chocolate paste was ground chocolate or cocoa cooked with sugar and a little water into a thick, spoonable syrup, kept warm at the counter. Use a good chocolate syrup or a thick ganache; two tablespoonfuls of straight cocoa powder will taste thin and chalky by comparison.
- Beat the white firstThe hinge of the drink is the egg white, which supplies the froth and body. Whisk it to a loose foam before combining, then add the boiling water in a thin stream while stirring hard, or it will set into threads instead of dispersing.
- Raw egg whiteThe boiling water heats the mixture but does not reliably bring the egg to a safe temperature, particularly in a preheated cup. Use pasteurized egg white, sold in cartons, if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- CocoanutThis could mean fresh coconut grated on a hand grater, unsweetened and moist, though prepared shredded and desiccated coconut was also widely sold by this date. Modern sweetened flake is much sweeter and coarser; unsweetened desiccated coconut is closer, and briefly soaking it in a little hot water softens it.
- Water quantityNone is given. Roughly six ounces of boiling water per serving gives a drink of normal strength; less if you want something closer to a demitasse of thick chocolate.
- Yield and servingOne cup. Serve it at once in a warmed mug or a tall glass with a spoon, since the coconut settles and the froth collapses quickly. It can be strained, which loses the coconut texture but avoids grit.
- The garnishA spoonful of whipped cream means cream whipped soft, unsweetened or barely sweetened, since the paste already carries the sugar. Dust the powdered cinnamon over the cream rather than into the drink so it stays visible and does not clump.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a wave of American beverage books published in the years around the First World War, when temperance sentiment and the approach of national Prohibition made the soda fountain a serious commercial rival to the bar. Its recipes are largely fountain formulas scaled down for the household: syrups, pastes, phosphates, egg drinks and hot chocolates of exactly this kind, built from a few stock preparations kept ready behind a counter. Coconut turns up constantly in the period because shredded and desiccated coconut had become cheap and widely distributed by the 1890s, and confectioners and fountain men used it in everything from pies to drinks. The egg white here is doing the work that a bar's shaken egg white did in a flip or a fizz, giving a soft, foamy body to a non-alcoholic drink, which was very much the point of a book named for climbing aboard the water wagon.