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Sultana Cocoa
Stem and wash half a pound of sultana raisins; let them stand, covered with one quart of boiling water, upon the back of the range an hour or more; filter the water through folds of cheese-cloth and use in making cocoa or chocolate.
1 egg.
This is really a flavored liquid rather than a finished drink: raisin-sweetened water to use in place of plain water when mixing cocoa or chocolate. The original assumes you already know how to build the cocoa itself.
- The stray lineThe printed page was checked: the line reads "1 egg." as our text now gives it. It belongs to a neighbouring recipe; nothing in this preparation uses an egg.
- SultanasSultanas are the pale seedless grapes now sold as golden raisins. Half a pound is about 1 1/2 cups. Modern raisins come clean and stemmed, so the washing and stemming step is usually unnecessary.
- "Back of the range"On a coal or wood range this was the coolest zone, where a covered pan would sit below a boil. Use the lowest burner setting, or a low oven, for an hour.
- QuantitiesOne quart is 4 cups of water; you will recover somewhat less after an hour of steeping and straining, since the raisins absorb some. Expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of infusion.
- StrainingCheesecloth folded several times catches the fine sediment that makes the infusion cloudy. A paper coffee filter will do the same job; a fine mesh sieve alone will leave grit.
- Using itThe book gives no cocoa proportions. Mix 1 tablespoon cocoa and a pinch of salt to a paste with a little of the hot infusion, then whisk in the rest and simmer a minute or two per cup. Taste before adding sugar, since the raisins supply a fair amount.
- The spent raisinsThey keep their body, though much of their sweetness will have passed into the water. Chop them into a bread pudding or a filling rather than discarding them.
- KeepingThe infusion is a dilute sugar solution with nothing to preserve it. Refrigerate and use within two days.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Dainties (first published 1899) belongs to the era when the chafing dish was a fashionable middle-class possession and "dainties" meant small, quickly assembled dishes for luncheons and late suppers. Sultana raisins are traditionally said to take their name from the Ottoman sultan, and they reached American kitchens largely from Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, before California plantings displaced the imports; they were prized for being seedless and pale at a time when many raisins had to be stoned by hand. Using fruit-steeped water to sweeten and round out a beverage was one economy available in an age when sugar was a real line in the household budget.