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Sandwiches (Spanish Chocolate To serve)
Spanish Chocolate. (To serve 60.) 6 quarts of milk. 3 blades of mace.
INGREDIENTS.
I five-inch stick of cinnamon. 12 cloves. 20 pounded almonds.
1 pound of chocolate. 3 cups of sugar. 2 quarts of boiling water.
Yolks of three eggs.
Method. - Scald the milk with the spices and nuts. Break up the chocolate and melt over hot water; add the sugar, mix thoroughly, then gradually stir in the boiling water; let cook two or three minutes after all the water has been added, then turn into the hot milk; let stand over hot water until ready to serve, then add the beaten yolks of eggs, diluted with half a cup of water, milk or cream, and strain through a cheese-cloth.
Keep hot over hot water. 2 quarts of claret.
1 cup of sugar.
1 cup of water. 5 lemons cut in slices.
A spiced drinking chocolate scaled for a reception, thickened with egg yolk and almonds in the older Spanish manner. Two things need attention before you start: the quantity, and the stray lines at the end.
- The last three lines are not part of this recipeThe last three lines do not belong to this recipe -- claret, sugar, water and sliced lemons are the makings of a wine cup, not a chocolate, and appear to have been carried over from an adjacent recipe. Ignore them.
- Scale it downAs written this makes roughly 8 quarts and serves 60 in small cups. Quartering gives about 2 quarts: 1.5 quarts milk, 4 oz chocolate, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 pint boiling water, 5 almonds, 1 yolk, and a short piece of cinnamon with a couple of cloves and a blade of mace.
- What "1 pound of chocolate" meansThis is unsweetened cake chocolate of the kind then sold in solid blocks, not a sweetened eating chocolate. Use unsweetened baking chocolate; modern semisweet or chips will make the drink cloying against 3 cups of sugar.
- Mace bladesA blade is a whole piece of the dried aril from around a nutmeg, not ground mace. If you only have ground, use a very small pinch per quart, since it will not strain out.
- Pounded almondsBlanched almonds crushed to a coarse paste in a mortar. They are there to thicken and enrich the milk, and they are strained out at the end, so a food processor pulse is fine.
- Melting over hot waterA double boiler or a bowl over barely simmering water. Chocolate scorches over direct heat and will seize if water splashes in before the sugar and boiling water are worked through it.
- The hinge: the yolksAdd the diluted beaten yolks only at the moment of serving, off direct heat, and never let the mixture boil afterward. Boiling curdles the yolk into threads that the cheesecloth will not fully catch. The chocolate should be hot enough throughout to hold above 160F once the yolks are in.
- Holding and servingKeep it in a covered vessel over hot water; a skin forms quickly on an open pot. Whisk or mill it just before pouring to raise the foam, and serve in small cups, 4 to 5 oz each.
Chocolate reached Europe as a drink rather than a confection, and the Spanish habit of thickening and spicing it, with cinnamon, cloves, mace and ground almonds, appears to be largely a European adaptation of the Mesoamerican preparations Spanish colonists encountered in the sixteenth century, which relied on chilli, vanilla and achiote. Egg yolk enrichment and the almond paste both do work that cornstarch or a thickened cocoa would do later; they also account for the froth that Spanish drinkers raised with a molinillo, the notched wooden whisk spun between the palms. By the time this book was compiled, "Spanish chocolate" had become an American entertaining formula, the sort of thing set out with sandwiches at an afternoon reception or kept hot over a chafing dish lamp — and here a recipe for 60 sits among the salads and sandwiches rather than in a chapter on beverages.