Cocoa Shells
Moisten two ounces of cocoa shells in cold water, and mix with a quart of boiling water. Boil for an hour and a half; strain, and add a quart of milk and bring to boiling. Serve with sugar if desired.
A thin, mildly chocolate infusion made from the husks that come off roasted cacao beans, not from ground cocoa. The long boil is the whole point and cannot be shortened much.
- Finding the shellsCocoa shells (cacao husk, sometimes sold as cacao tea) were a cheap grocery item in the period and are now sold by specialty chocolate makers and tea merchants. The shells are very light, so two ounces is a large loose volume; weigh them if you can rather than measuring by cup.
- Why an hour and a halfThe shells are woody and give up their flavor slowly; a five-minute steep tastes of almost nothing. Keep the pan at a bare simmer with a lid slightly ajar, and top up with hot water if it reduces much below a quart.
- StrainingUse a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth or a coffee filter. Shell fragments are papery and will slip through an ordinary colander, leaving grit in the cup.
- The milk stepBring the combined liquid just to the point of steaming rather than a rolling boil. Milk scorches on the bottom of the pan and will overwhelm the delicate flavor you spent ninety minutes extracting.
- What it tastes likeExpect something between weak hot chocolate and a malty tea, with little fat or body, since most of the cocoa butter stays with the nib rather than the husk. It is low in caffeine but does contain theobromine.
- YieldAbout two quarts, or six to eight cups. It keeps refrigerated for a few days and reheats without harm; sweeten in the cup rather than the pot.
- One warningCocoa shells are dangerous to dogs for the same reason chocolate is. Discard spent shells where a pet cannot reach them rather than putting them on a garden bed.
Cocoa shells were the byproduct of chocolate manufacture: when roasted cacao beans are cracked and winnowed, the thin husk is blown away from the nib that becomes chocolate. Through much of the nineteenth century that husk was sold cheaply by the pound for household use, and it turns up in American and British cookbooks as cocoa shell tea. Cacao husk has come back into fashion with the craft chocolate trade, which now markets the same material as cacao tea at a considerable markup over what a period grocer charged.