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Mexican Iced Chocolate
Scald one pint of milk with one fourth cup of finely ground coffee and a small piece of stick cinnamon, and strain. Grate four squares of chocolate and add one half cup of boiling water and one half cup of sugar, and boil five minutes, stirring constantly to make very smooth. Add the chocolate to the scalded milk and coffee, and when cool flavor with two teaspoonfuls of vanilla. When ready to serve add four cups of cold milk and chill thoroughly. Serve with crushed ice and whipped cream in each glass.
A cold chocolate-coffee drink from a Prohibition-era book of home beverages. The proportions are sound; only the units and the chocolate itself need translating.
- Four squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for 4 oz. Do not substitute semisweet or chocolate chips without cutting the half cup of sugar sharply.
- The hinge: boil the chocolate pasteGrating the chocolate and boiling it with the water and sugar for the full five minutes with constant stirring is what the recipe means by "to make very smooth." A shorter cook is likelier to leave the drink grainy.
- Scalding, not boilingBring the pint of milk to about 180F, just to a shimmer with bubbles at the edge, then hold it off the heat with the coffee and cinnamon for five to ten minutes before straining. A true boil will scorch the milk and pull bitterness from the grounds.
- StrainingA quarter cup of finely ground coffee will pass straight through a mesh sieve. Line it with cheesecloth or use a paper filter.
- Cinnamon"Stick cinnamon" means a broken piece of a whole quill; the recipe asks only for a small piece. Mexican canela (true cinnamon) is softer and more floral than the cassia sold as cinnamon sticks in most supermarkets, and is closer to what the name implies.
- Cool before the vanillaThe instruction to flavor when cool is deliberate: vanilla extract is largely alcohol and its aroma boils off in a hot base.
- YieldAbout six and a half cups of liquid before ice (two cups scalded milk, half a cup of water, four cups cold milk), or six to eight small glasses. It thins considerably once crushed ice melts, so chill the mixture hard first and keep the ice to a minimum.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre that flourished as national Prohibition approached: collections of nonalcoholic drinks meant to give hostesses something to serve at gatherings where the punch bowl had gone dry. The "Mexican" here signals the two additions that Anglo-American cooks associated with Mexican chocolate, cinnamon and a strong coffee note; drinking chocolate in Mexico does traditionally carry canela and is whisked to a foam with a molinillo, though the coffee is more an American embellishment than a Mexican one. The whipped cream and crushed ice suggest a soda-fountain drink of its moment, when the fountain was arguably inheriting the social role of the bar.