Racahaut
Mix one pound of rice flour, two tablespoonfuls of arrowroot, half a pound of powdered sugar, and one half pound of grated chocolate. Keep in an airtight jar. Make the same as chocolate, allowing four dessertspoonfuls to one quart of milk.
A dry drink powder to be kept on hand and whisked into hot milk, in the manner of a Victorian instant cocoa. The proportions are sound, but two of the measures need translating before you scale it.
- DessertspoonfulA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, so four of them is roughly 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons of powder per quart of milk. That makes a light, barely thickened drink by modern standards.
- "Make the same as chocolate"The assumed method is to slake the powder with a little cold milk to a smooth paste, then stir it into the rest of the milk as it heats and hold it just below a simmer for a few minutes. The arrowroot and rice flour need that gentle heat to swell; dumped dry into hot milk they lump instantly.
- Rice flourUse finely milled white rice flour, not the coarse or brown grinds sold for gluten-free baking, and not glutinous (sweet) rice flour, which will turn the drink gluey. One pound is roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups depending on the grind.
- ArrowrootStill sold as arrowroot starch or arrowroot powder. It thickens at a lower temperature than cornstarch and loses body if boiled hard, another reason to keep the milk short of a rolling boil. Cornstarch will serve as a substitute, though it is not an exact match.
- Grated chocolateThis most likely means plain unsweetened cake chocolate, grated on the fine side of a box grater. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the nearest equivalent; if you substitute cocoa powder use roughly two-thirds to three-quarters the weight, since cocoa carries no cocoa butter.
- SweetnessHalf a pound of sugar against half a pound of chocolate makes a mix that is already sweetened, so taste before adding more at the cup. "Powdered sugar" here means sugar ground fine, not necessarily the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch.
- StorageThe airtight jar is not decorative. Ground chocolate carries fat that goes stale, and rice flour picks up odours; keep it cool and dark and use it within a couple of months.
Racahout, more often printed as racahout des Arabes, was a nineteenth-century restorative powder sold across Europe and America as an easily digested food for invalids, convalescents and children. The name is generally traced to an Arabic term for a starchy nourishing preparation, and commercial versions were built on some combination of acorn flour, salep (dried orchid tuber), rice flour, potato or arrowroot starch, sugar and chocolate or vanilla. By the time this version was written down the exotic components had largely dropped away, leaving what is essentially a homemade cocoa mix thickened with starch, cheaper than the branded tins and free of their more dubious claims.