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Plain Chocolate
Prepare as in preceding recipe, omitting the cream mixture and such portion of the chocolate as is desired.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it points back to the preceding chafing-dish chocolate and tells you to leave out the whipped cream and cut back the chocolate. Reading it on its own, a few things need filling in.
- What "plain" means hereThe preceding recipe evidently finished the drink with a cream mixture; this version serves it bare. The reduction "as is desired" applies to the chocolate, not the milk.
- The chocolate itselfTurn-of-the-century recipes of this kind generally mean unsweetened cake chocolate sold in squares, not cocoa powder and not eating chocolate. Period proportions commonly run somewhere around an ounce of unsweetened chocolate and a tablespoon of sugar per cup of milk, though books differ; for a plain version, start at the lower end.
- Melt it with liquid, not alonePeriod practice was often to grate or shave the chocolate, rub it smooth with the sugar and a few tablespoons of boiling water, cook that to a paste, then add the scalded milk. Dropping dry chocolate straight into hot milk tends to leave specks.
- Chafing-dish heatHeat -- If this is made over a chafing dish, use the hot-water pan rather than the direct flame: milk scorches on a bare blazer bottom and boiling can spoil the texture and form a skin.
- FrothBeating the finished chocolate before pouring was a common way to raise a foam; without the cream cap, that foam is the only thing distinguishing this from plain hot milk.
Drinking chocolate reached American parlors long before eating chocolate did, and by the 1890s it is often said to have become standard chafing-dish work: a hostess could make it at the table after cards or the theater without troubling the kitchen. The alternation of a rich version and a "plain" one appears to be a familiar pattern in the period's beverage chapters — the cream-topped cup for company, the unadorned one for anyone who found it too heavy at eleven at night. The instruction to omit "such portion of the chocolate as is desired" is a reminder that the base was strong by modern standards; unsweetened cake chocolate carries all its cocoa butter, and a full-strength cup of it is closer to a dessert than a drink.