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Chocolate Syrup (One-half pound American)
One-half pound American Chocolate Paste, 1 pound American Powdered Chocolate, 6 ounces cornstarch, 2 gallons hot water, 3 quarts simple syrup. Dissolve the chocolate in hot water, using great care not to scorch it. Mix the cornstarch with cold water. Before adding the cornstarch see that the chocolate is thoroughly dissolved and brought to boiling heat. Then add the cornstarch, and boil well that it may be sufficiently cooked to prevent any starchy taste. Strain through a sieve to remove coarser particles. In dispensing it sufficient cream should be put into the cup first. Add the chocolate, then sweetening if necessary; fill with hot water from the draft tube, and stir with a spoon. Top with whipped cream.
This is a bulk syrup for a soda fountain's hot chocolate draft, not a bottle of sauce for sundaes. It makes roughly eleven quarts, and the whole method is built around a fountain's hot-water tube and a dispenser's spoon.
- Scale it downThe full batch is about 2.75 gallons of finished syrup. Divide everything by eight for a home quantity: 1 oz chocolate paste, 2 oz powdered chocolate, ¾ oz cornstarch, 1 quart hot water, 1.5 cups simple syrup.
- What the chocolates were"American Chocolate Paste" and "American Powdered Chocolate" read as proprietary goods from a fountain supply house rather than generic descriptions. The paste would have been an unsweetened chocolate liquor softened for dissolving; the powder, a cocoa, possibly sweetened. Use unsweetened baking chocolate for the paste and natural or Dutch-process cocoa for the powder, and taste before you decide on extra sugar.
- Simple syrupFountain simple syrup of the period was heavier than the thin 1:1 syrup bartenders use now; the pharmacy-standard syrup ran nearer 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight. At the lighter ratio the finished drink will read as noticeably less sweet, which may be part of why the recipe allows for "sweetening if necessary" in the cup.
- Scorching is the hingeCocoa solids catch on a hot pan bottom in seconds and the burnt taste carries through the whole batch. Dissolve the chocolate in water already hot, over moderate heat, stirring constantly, or work in a double boiler until it is smooth before you raise the heat.
- Cornstarch, slurried and boiledMix the cornstarch with cold water to a thin cream first, or it will lump irretrievably. Once added it needs a full two to three minutes at a boil: undercooked starch tastes chalky and will thin out again as it stands.
- StrainingPass it through a fine sieve while hot. Cocoa powder almost always leaves a few unwetted lumps, and they are the difference between a smooth cup and a gritty one.
- ServingThis is a hot chocolate base. The order given matters: cream in the cup first so it tempers and disperses, then the syrup, then hot water. About 1.5 to 2 oz of syrup per 6 oz cup is a reasonable starting point.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative here beyond sugar. Refrigerate and use within about a week; the cornstarch will thicken the syrup appreciably when cold and it needs gentle reheating and stirring to loosen.
The American soda fountain sold hot drinks as well as cold, and by the turn of the twentieth century a good marble counter carried a hot-water draft tube alongside the carbonated one — hence the instruction to "fill with hot water from the draft tube." Chocolate was one of the staples of that hot side, which it shared with hot beef tea, bouillon and coffee, and dispensers bought it as proprietary pastes and powders from supply houses rather than compounding it from beans. The cornstarch looks like a practical trade touch: it gives the syrup body so the drink does not taste thin when cut with plain hot water, and it keeps the cocoa solids in suspension in the syrup jar between customers. Formula books like this one existed to standardise exactly that sort of thing, so that a fountain's chocolate tasted the same in March as in September.