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Chocolate Syrup for Hot Soda
One pound American Chocolate Paste, 21/½ pints milk. Bring the milk to a boiling point and pour over the chocolate, which should first be shaved or broken into small pieces. Then boil for 2 or 3 minutes, stirring constantly until dissolved, and strain while hot. To serve, use from 1 to 2 ounces of the above to a mug three-quarters full of boiling hot water or hot milk and water mixed equal parts, with a spoonful of whipped cream on top.
A fountain-scale syrup base meant to be held hot and dispensed by the ounce. Scaled down it makes a very good drinking-chocolate concentrate, with two things to watch: the ambiguous quantity in the original, and the fact that this is a dairy syrup, not a shelf-stable one.
- The milk quantity is a typo"21/½ pints" is a printer's mangling, almost certainly 2½ pints — 5 cups — to a pound of chocolate paste. That ratio gives a thick pourable syrup; treat any other reading as unusable.
- American Chocolate PasteA chocolate mass sold in blocks to the trade; the instruction to shave or break it shows it arrived solid. Its exact sugar and cocoa-butter content is not stated here, so a sweet or semi-sweet block chocolate is the practical stand-in; if you use unsweetened you will have to add sugar to taste to get anywhere near the fountain drink.
- Do not actually boil the milk hard"Bring to a boiling point" -- scalding point is enough before pouring over the chocolate; the recipe calls for the actual boil later, after the two are combined. Watch the pan bottom either way, as scorched milk carries through to the finished syrup.
- The two-minute boil is the emulsionThe 2-to-3-minute boil -- the recipe ties the constant stirring to getting the chocolate dissolved. Keeping it moving also helps keep the cocoa butter dispersed rather than separating out.
- Strain while hotThe recipe calls for it, and a fine sieve while the syrup is hot will catch milk skin and any undissolved specks.
- Serving ratio and yieldThe batch comes to roughly 50 fluid ounces, so at 1 to 2 oz per mug that is somewhere between about 25 and 50 servings; worth quartering unless you are running a counter. A mug three-quarters full leaves room for the whipped cream.
- StorageThis is milk and chocolate with no preservative and nothing shelf-stable about it. Refrigerate and use within three or four days; it will thicken cold and needs gentle rewarming.
Soda fountains were seasonal businesses, and "hot soda" was the answer to winter, when nobody wanted iced phosphates. By the turn of the century American fountains were fitting urns and hot-water taps alongside the carbonators and selling hot chocolate, beef tea, clam bouillon and hot lemonade through the cold months. Trade manuals like this one were written for the druggist-operator, which is why the recipe is given as a bulk syrup with a dispensing ratio rather than as a drink: the labour goes in once and the counter work is a measure of syrup and hot water. The instruction to shave or break the "American Chocolate Paste" before scalding tells you it arrived hard enough to need a knife.