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Chocolate Syrup (American Powdered Chocolate lb)
American Powdered Chocolate, 1 lb.; Water, 5 pints; Cornstarch, ½ ounces; Sugar, 5 5 lbs. Dissolve the sugar in hot water, add the chocolate, using great care not to scorch it. Mix the cornstarch with cold water, add to the chocolate, and boil for one minute over a slow fire, stirring constantly; strain through a sieve to remove coarser particles. A double boiler should be used, and burning thus avoided. Chocolate should always be boiled, for otherwise its full body and flavor cannot be obtained; therefore, be sure to bring your syrup to a boil. Cornstarch gives body, and, if properly cooked, is tasteless. If not thoroughly cooked, however, it gives a starchy taste, and, if burnt, its flavor is very noticeable.
A soda-fountain bulk syrup, written for a dispenser who wanted a gallon at a time. Scaling it down to a quarter is the first thing most home cooks will want to do.
- The sugar figure is garbled"Sugar, 5 5 lbs." appears to be a typesetting error. Five pounds is the most likely reading (5½ lbs is another possibility), and either gives the heavy syrup density fountains wanted. It should not be read as 55 lbs.
- Cornstarch quantity"½ ounces" is likewise unclear, but half an ounce (about 2 tablespoons) for a gallon of syrup is the sensible reading. It is there for body only, not thickening in the pudding sense.
- American Powdered ChocolateApparently a period term for unsweetened cocoa powder; cocoa of the era may have carried more cocoa butter than modern cocoa, though this varied by maker. Natural (non-alkalized) cocoa gives the sharper, more old-fashioned flavor; Dutch-process gives a rounder, darker one.
- Quarter batch4 oz cocoa, 2½ cups water, 1¼ lb sugar, and about 1½ teaspoons cornstarch slaked in cold water. Yields roughly a quart.
- The hinge is the one-minute boilUndercooked cornstarch tastes raw and chalky, and cocoa solids scorch the instant they touch a dry hot surface. The double boiler is not optional if you are stirring casually; over direct heat, use a heavy pan and keep the spoon moving the whole minute.
- Slow fire means low heat"boil ... over a slow fire" is a bare simmer maintained deliberately, not a rolling boil. In a double boiler you may not reach a true boil at all, which may be why the text insists on bringing the syrup to a boil.
- StrainingThe recipe sieves out "coarser particles," suggesting cocoa of the period could clump. Modern cocoa sifted before it meets the syrup rarely needs sieving, though a pass through a fine strainer does no harm.
- Serving and keepingFountain practice was about 1 to 1½ fluid ounces of syrup per glass, topped with soda water or stirred into cold milk. Refrigerate; the high sugar content keeps it several weeks, but the cornstarch will eventually thin and the syrup may weep.
Fountain manuals of this kind were written for the dispenser behind the counter rather than the housewife, which is why quantities arrive in pounds and pints and why the author lectures on technique rather than proportion. Chocolate was among the fountain's staple flavors, alongside vanilla and lemon. The insistence that chocolate "should always be boiled" points to a real property of the powder: cooking gelatinizes the starch it contains, and the cornstarch was added as further insurance for a syrup that had to cling to a spoon and hold its own against carbonated water.