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Chocolate Syrup (American Powdered Cocoa lb)
American Powdered Cocoa, 1 lb.; Granulated Sugar, 10 lbs.; Water, 1 gallon; Sweet Cream, 6 ounces; Extract Vanilla, ½ ounce. Put water on the fire with the cocoa, keep stirring to prevent lumping, when it comes to a boil add the sugar and stir until it is all dissolved, then let it come to a boil and boil three minutes. Strain through cloth while hot. Allow to cool and then stir in the cream and vanilla extract. Do not have your syrup too thick as it does not mix well.
A soda-fountain bulk formula, written for a shop that went through gallons a week. Scaled down it makes a good pouring syrup for milk, seltzer or ice cream, but the proportions and consistency both need attention.
- The hinge: keep it thinThe closing line is the whole point of the recipe. A syrup boiled down heavy will sit in a rope at the bottom of the glass and refuse to blend with cold milk or charged water. If it thickens past the consistency of warm maple syrup, thin it with a little hot water before it cools.
- Yield and scalingAs written this makes roughly seven quarts. A sixteenth batch is workable in a home kitchen: 1 oz (about 1/3 cup) cocoa, 10 oz (about 1 1/3 cups) sugar, 1 cup water, a scant tablespoon cream, a scant 1/4 teaspoon vanilla.
- "American powdered cocoa"This means natural, non-alkalized cocoa, the ordinary unsweetened powder of the period. Dutch-process cocoa will work but gives a darker, rounder, less acidic syrup with none of the sharp fruity edge the original would have had.
- SweetnessTen parts sugar to one of cocoa is a fountain ratio, built to survive dilution in a tall glass of soda water. Poured neat over ice cream it will taste very sweet; cutting the sugar to about 7 lbs per pound of cocoa brings it closer to modern expectations.
- Mixing without lumpsCocoa scorches and clumps readily. Whisk the powder into cold water before it goes on the heat rather than adding it to water already warming, and keep the pan wide -- a sugar syrup at a rolling boil climbs fast.
- StrainingThe cloth is not optional. It catches undissolved cocoa grit and any skin formed during boiling, and it is what separates a fountain syrup from homemade cocoa sludge. A double layer of muslin or a fine chinois does the job.
- Cream and vanilla go in coldBoth are added after cooling for a reason: heat drives off the vanilla's aroma and can curdle cream in an acidic natural-cocoa syrup. Wait until the pan is genuinely at room temperature.
- KeepingThe sugar concentration is high, but the added cream means this is no longer a shelf-stable syrup. Refrigerate it and use it within about two weeks; a fountain went through a batch in days.
This is fountain-trade writing: quantities in pounds and gallons, a note about how the syrup behaves in the glass, no mention of what to do with it because any soda clerk already knew. Chocolate was the backbone flavor of the American soda fountain from the late nineteenth century onward, drawn from a crock of syrup that served equally for chocolate sodas, ice cream sundaes, malted milks and plain chocolate milk. Cocoa powder itself only became a cheap bulk ingredient after the invention of the hydraulic cocoa press in the Netherlands -- generally credited to Coenraad van Houten in the 1820s -- which squeezed most of the fat out of the ground bean and left a defatted cake that could be milled to powder. The "American" in American powdered cocoa distinguishes plain domestic cocoa from the alkalized Dutch product.