Home › Food Drinks and Fun Drinks › Mexican Chocolate
Mexican Chocolate
Aztec Chocolatl 2 SQUARES UNSWEET- ENED CHOCOLATE 1/2 CUP WATER 1½ CUPS MILK 2 TABLESPOONS SUGAR Melt and cook chocolate in water and when it thickens add milk and sugar, bring to boiling point and beat to a stiff froth.
The secret of making fine Mexican chocolate is in the strenuous beating thereof. For this purpose the Aztecs of old invented a hand chocolate mill, consisting of a pot holding 2 or 3 cups, a tight-fitting cover with a hole in the middle to accommodate a wooden plunger or swizzle stick equipped with paddles. The handle is rotated rapidly between the palms until the drink foams over. When Cortez took one back to Spain together with the Aztec's chocolatl, the chocolate pot and plunger was named molinillo (little mill) by the Spaniards who adopted the new beverage with enthusiasm—but later ruined it by making it too thick with cornstarch in an effort to imitate Mexican Atole Champurrado. (See recipe.) If you ever get used to making chocolate in a molinillo you'll never like it half so well in any other way. We have a battered antique one of silver we picked up in Guadalajara twenty years ago, and it's as indispensable as our French pepper grinder which, by the way, we bought in Rio de Janeiro. Molinillos are made of all sorts of materials and come in beautiful shapes with richly embossed or colored decorations, and they're collected as enthusiastically by chocolate topers as yerba maté addicts gather in the artistic drinking gourds and bombillas of Paraquay and the Argentine. The great Montezuma, who drank fifty cups of chocolate a day, had it all made in a molinillo of gold, and chocolate was so highly esteemed then that the cacao seeds of which it is made were used as money. (Cacao has been senselessly Angelicized to "cocoa.") Mexicans often make their mulled or milled chocolate with honey in place of sugar, and it was from this thick sweet mixture that Antonio Carletti, pastry chef to the king of Spain got the idea of making the first chocolate candy in 1662.
A two-cup drinking chocolate built on unsweetened baking chocolate, with the froth doing most of the work. The proportions are sound; only the vessel and a few of the surrounding claims need translating.
- The squaresA square of unsweetened chocolate is one ounce, so this calls for 2 oz total. Chopped bulk unsweetened chocolate works identically; cocoa powder is not a like-for-like swap, having had most of its cocoa butter pressed out, and gives a thinner cup.
- Not Mexican chocolate tabletsIbarra, Abuelita and similar disc-shaped tablets are already sweetened and cinnamon-scented, usually with sugar as the first ingredient. Substituting them means dropping the sugar here entirely and expecting a grittier, sweeter cup.
- Melting in waterChocolate seizes when it meets only a little water, but at this ratio -- half a cup to 2 oz -- there is liquid enough for a smooth paste. Keep the heat low and stir steadily until it is glossy and thick, two or three minutes, then add the milk gradually rather than all at once.
- "Bring to boiling point"Take it to the first shiver of bubbles at the edge and no further. A rolling boil scorches milk solids onto the pan bottom and gives the whole drink a burnt edge that beating will not remove.
- The beatingThis is the hinge. A molinillo is the wooden plunger itself, rotated between the palms; the pot is a chocolatera. Lacking one, an immersion blender for fifteen seconds off the heat gives the same stiff foam, and a balloon whisk worked hard is the next best thing.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of sugar against 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate is restrained by modern taste. Taste before frothing and add more if wanted, or use honey as the note at the end suggests, which brings its own faint floral bitterness.
- YieldAbout two cups finished, though the froth makes it look like more. Two small cups, or one generous one.
Chocolate reached Europe as a drink, not a confection, and the equipment came with it: the molinillo, a turned wooden shaft with loose rings and paddles, is a Spanish colonial invention rather than a pre-Conquest one, developed to replace the Aztec practice of pouring the liquid from vessel to vessel at a height to raise the foam. That foam was the point. Sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of Mexico describe the froth as the most prized part of the cup, and the drink itself as bitter, spiced with chilli and achiote rather than sugar. The claim that cacao beans served as currency is well documented in Nahua tribute records; the figure of fifty cups a day for Motecuhzoma comes from Bernal Díaz and has been repeated ever since without much scrutiny. The attribution of the first chocolate candy to a pastry chef named Carletti in 1662 should be treated as a story rather than a fact — the Carletti usually named in chocolate history is Francesco Carletti, a Florentine merchant who wrote about cacao around 1600, and solid eating chocolate is generally traced to the nineteenth century.