Home › At the Fountain › Hot Chocolate Sauce
Hot Chocolate Sauce
One-half pound American Powdered Cocoa, ½ pound sugar, 2 pints milk, 4 ounces cream, 1 dram vanilla extract. Boil milk, add cocoa, stirring until it is thoroughly dissolved. Put this over the fire, let it come to a boil, and boil for 5 minutes, mixing constantly. Strain and stir in the cream and vanilla extract.
A soda-fountain working sauce rather than a dessert topping: it is meant to be held hot and ladled into cups or over ice cream through a shift. The proportions are heavy on cocoa, and the method has one gap worth catching before you start.
- The sugar is orphanedThe ingredient list calls for half a pound of sugar but the method never mentions it. Whisk it dry with the cocoa before it meets the milk, which also prevents the cocoa from clumping.
- Powdered cocoa, 1900s style"American Powdered Cocoa" most likely means plain unsweetened natural cocoa rather than a Dutch-process powder or a sweetened drinking mix, though the recipe does not spell this out. Half a pound is roughly 2½ cups of modern cocoa powder — a very dark, almost paste-thick sauce by current standards.
- 1 dram of vanillaA fluid dram is 3.7 ml, about three-quarters of a modern teaspoon, though period texts often treated dram and teaspoon as equivalent. Apothecary measures turn up frequently in fountain formulas, a legacy of the drugstore counter.
- Boiling and scorchingFive minutes at a rolling boil with this much solids in suspension will catch on the bottom of a thin pan. Use a heavy-bottomed pot over moderate heat and keep the spoon moving against the base, or set it over a water bath.
- Strain, and mean itThe straining step is not optional garnish. Natural cocoa throws grit and undissolved lumps; pass the sauce through a fine sieve before the cream goes in.
- Cream and vanilla go in off the heatBoth are added after the boil so the vanilla does not flash off and the cream does not break. Do not return it to the boil afterward.
- Yield and holdingRather more than a quart; nearer a quart and a half once the sugar and cocoa are in. Fountains would have kept it warm rather than reheating to order; a home cook should cool it and refrigerate, then rewarm gently — it thickens considerably when cold and will loosen with a splash of milk.
Soda-fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the housewife, and they read like it: quantities in pounds and pints because the sauce was made in batches to last a day, and flavourings in apothecary drams because the fountain grew out of the drugstore. Hot chocolate at the fountain was a winter proposition ated the soda counter earning in the months when nobody wanted a phosphate ait is a fair guess that the same pot of sauce served double duty, thinned with hot milk into a cup of cocoa or spooned thick over ice cream. The difference between alkalised and natural cocoa was in any case a real one in the trade: alkalised cocoa was darker and milder, natural cocoa sharper and more acidic.