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Delicious Chocolate
Grate two ounces (two squares) of bitter chocolate, and mix with enough boiling water to make a thin paste. Add this to one quart of scalded milk, with one cupful of sugar, and cook for five or ten minutes. Beat whites of two eggs very stiff and add gradually two mashed bananas mixed with two tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar. Serve a spoonful of banana cream on top of each cup of hot chocolate. Will serve six people.
The chocolate base is straightforward and still worth making; the garnish is the problem. Notes below cover both the archaic measures and the reason the banana cream cannot be served as written.
- The raw egg white toppingThe banana cream is uncooked beaten egg white, spooned onto the drink at the table. A spoonful of foam floating on hot chocolate never reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the mashed banana gives it a friendly medium to sit in. Use a current recipe if you want a topping of this kind.
- Bitter chocolateThis is unsweetened baking chocolate, not bittersweet or dark eating chocolate. The recipe's own gloss, two squares to two ounces, reflects the one-ounce square of its day; modern bars are not always divided the same way, so weigh the chocolate rather than counting squares. Substituting sweetened chocolate throws the sugar wildly out.
- The paste stepGrating and then working the chocolate to a thin paste with boiling water is the hinge of the recipe. Unsweetened chocolate dropped straight into milk tends to clump rather than disperse; the water paste breaks it up first.
- Scalded milkHeat the quart of milk until it steams and a skin begins to form at the edges, around 180F, not to a rolling boil. A quart is four cups.
- SugarA full cupful in a quart is sweet by modern taste, and the powdered sugar in the topping adds more. Half a cup in the base is closer to what most people now expect from drinking chocolate.
- Cook five or ten minutesThis means a bare simmer with frequent stirring. Left over direct heat unattended it will scorch on the bottom and taste burnt throughout.
- YieldSix cups, as stated, which are teacups rather than mugs. Figure four generous servings by current measure.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance drink literature that flourished in the United States in the years around national Prohibition, when household books set out to prove that a hostess could serve something interesting without alcohol. Hot chocolate, punches, fruit shrubs and eggnogs made without spirits filled the gap, and the ambition was for them to feel like occasion drinks rather than consolation prizes — hence the whipped garnish and the printed serving count. Bananas signal the period as clearly as the temperance framing does: by the 1910s refrigerated steamships had turned them from a curiosity into a cheap year-round fruit in American cities, and cookbooks of the decade put them into everything from salads to pie fillings.