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Chocolate Syrup (One pound American Powdered)
One pound American Powdered Cocoa, 2¼ pounds granulated sugar, 5 pints milk, 2 eggs, 1 ounce extract vanilla. Heat the milk to a boiling point. Take a small quantity and mix with the cocoa to a smooth paste. Then add balance of milk, eggs well beaten, and sugar, and boil for 3 minutes, stirring all the time. When cold add the extract of vanilla. Strain while hot. To serve, use 1 to 2 ounces of the above syrup to a mug three-quarters full of hot water or hot milk, and serve with a spoonful of whipped cream on top.
This is a commercial fountain formula, sized for a shop that will pour it by the ounce all winter. Everything about it — the 24 pounds of sugar, the strain-while-hot instruction, the mug three-quarters full — assumes a marble counter and a steady trade.
- The sugar-to-milk ratio does not add upTwenty-four pounds of sugar to five pints of milk sits at or past what that quantity of liquid will hold in solution even at boiling, and on cooling it would set to a stiff, grainy mass rather than a pourable syrup. Some fountain formulas of the period assumed the operator would carry the batch out with hot water to a working gallonage; this one does not say so. Treat the proportion as questionable or incomplete rather than as a tested ratio.
- Scaling downDivide by 24 for a household batch: 1 lb sugar, about 3 1/3 fl oz milk (a scant half cup), roughly 2/3 oz (3 tablespoons) cocoa, about a twelfth of an egg — beat one and use a tablespoon of it — and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla. Even then expect to add water to reach syrup consistency.
- American Powdered CocoaNatural, unsweetened, non-alkalized cocoa. "American" was the trade's way of distinguishing it from Dutch-process cocoa, which is darkened and mellowed with alkali. Natural cocoa is sharper and more acidic; Dutch cocoa will give a rounder, flatter drink and a browner colour.
- GrainingA syrup this saturated will crystallize in the bottle within days. Commercial practice was to replace part of the sugar with glucose (corn syrup) — a quarter of the total by weight is a reasonable working figure — or to add a pinch of cream of tartar, which inverts some of the sucrose during the boil.
- Order of operationsThe text says to add vanilla when cold and to strain while hot; do the straining first, off the boil, then cool and stir in the extract. Alcohol-based vanilla loses aroma in a hot syrup, which may be why the original holds it back.
- ScorchingMilk, egg and sugar boiled together over direct heat catch quickly and the burnt taste cannot be strained out. Use the heaviest pot you have, keep the spoon moving across the whole bottom, and pull it at three minutes rather than judging by thickness — it will not look thick until it cools.
- StorageThis is a dairy syrup with egg in it. The boil pasteurizes it and the sugar load suppresses spoilage, but a soda fountain sold its batch out in days. Refrigerate, and make no more than you will drink within a week.
- Yield and servingAt 1 to 2 ounces per mug, the full formula runs to something on the order of 150 to 300 servings. The divide-by-24 batch suggested above gives well under a pint of syrup, or something like eight to a dozen drinks.
American soda fountains were a summer business by nature, and the trade press of the 1890s and 1900s pushed hot drinks hard as the answer to the dead months — hot chocolate, hot beef tea, hot clam bouillon, all dispensed from the same counter that sold phosphates in July. A syrup like this one let a dispenser produce a hot chocolate in seconds from a mug of hot water or steamed milk, with no cocoa to lump and no sugar to stir in. The distinction drawn in the title matters too: "American powdered cocoa" meant plain natural cocoa, as against the alkali-treated Dutch product generally traced to the van Houten works in the Netherlands. The egg was presumably added for body and a fuller mouthfeel rather than for flavour, and it may be why the recipe calls for straining.