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Ceylon Cocoa
Scald a two-inch piece of paper-bark cinnamon with the milk to be used in making the cocoa.
This is a flavoring instruction rather than a full formula — it assumes you already have a cocoa recipe in hand and tells you how to turn it into "Ceylon" cocoa. Everything hinges on using the right cinnamon and not letting the milk boil.
- Paper-bark cinnamonThis is true Ceylon cinnamon, Cinnamomum verum, whose quills are thin, tan, and rolled in papery layers that crumble under a thumb. The hard, dark, single-walled sticks sold as cinnamon in most supermarkets are cassia, which is coarser and more aggressive; a two-inch piece of cassia will overwhelm the cocoa. Look for cinnamon labeled Ceylon or verum.
- What "scald" meansBring the milk to about 180°F — steaming, with bubbles just forming at the rim — and hold it there. Boiling makes a skin and a cooked-milk flavor that no amount of cocoa hides.
- Steeping timeThe original gives none. Ten minutes off the heat with the pan covered draws out plenty; twenty minutes gives a stronger, spicier cup. Fish the quill out before it starts to shed bark into the drink.
- A working baseIf you need proportions, try about 1 teaspoon cocoa powder and 1 to 2 teaspoons sugar per cup, adjusting to taste. Mix the dry cocoa and sugar to a smooth paste with a spoonful of boiling water, cook it a moment, then whisk in the scalded, strained cinnamon milk.
- Strain and frothPour through a fine sieve to catch bark fragments, then whisk hard or use a milk frother if you want foam, as frothed chocolate and cocoa were long served that way.
- YieldOne quill of this size flavors about a pint of milk, or roughly two cups of finished cocoa. Scale the cinnamon with the milk, not with the cocoa.
Cinnamon and cocoa have been paired since the Spanish adopted chocolate from Mesoamerica, where it was already drunk with local aromatics; cinnamon, vanilla and sugar became a common European combination, and Mexican drinking chocolate still comes with cinnamon pressed into the tablet. The "Ceylon" here most likely refers to the cinnamon rather than the cocoa, though the island was also a cocoa-growing colony: the island now called Sri Lanka was the source of the finest cinnamon in the trade, controlled successively by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, and its thin layered quills were sold and priced separately from the cheaper cassia bark of southern China and Vietnam. That the recipe bothers to specify paper-bark suggests the two were sold side by side and that the distinction mattered to buyers. Cocoa was a drink associated with late suppers, invalids and breakfast trays, and could be made at the table over a spirit lamp without troubling the kitchen range.