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Improved Hot Chocolate Syrup
Eight ounces best powdered cocoa, 4 pints water, 21/½ pounds sugar. Place the cocoa in a double boiler, add the water slowly to prevent it from becoming lumpy, strain through a cheese cloth to remove all lumps.
A fountain syrup rather than a drink: it is meant to be pumped by the ounce into hot water or hot milk. The written procedure stops before the sugar is used, so the sequence has to be reconstructed.
- The sugar step is missingThe ingredient list calls for sugar but the method never mentions it. The obvious reconstruction is to add the sugar to the hot cocoa and water in the double boiler and stir until dissolved, then strain.
- That sugar quantity is ambiguous"21/½ pounds" is a printer's mangling, almost certainly 2½ pounds; 21 pounds to 4 pints of water would be an unworkable, near-saturated mass rather than a pumpable syrup.
- Slake the cocoa, do not dump the water inThis is the hinge. Cocoa powder hydrates into lumps instantly if flooded. Work a few tablespoons of the water into the powder to a smooth paste first, then let the rest in gradually.
- Cocoa has changed"Best powdered cocoa" is not specific as to type; it may have been either natural or Dutch-process (alkalised). Dutch-process dissolves more readily and tastes rounder in a sweet syrup; natural cocoa reads sharper and more acidic.
- Double boiler for a reasonCocoa solids scorch easily and a heavy sugar syrup catches over direct heat. Keep the water below at a bare simmer and give it time with occasional stirring; a properly cooked syrup is less prone to settling in the bottle.
- StrainingCheesecloth is fine, but a fine mesh sieve does the same job faster and does not absorb syrup. Strain while hot; the cooled syrup is thicker and passes much more slowly.
- Yield and useAbout 2½ quarts of syrup. Reckon roughly 1 to 1½ fluid ounces per cup of hot milk or hot water, adjusted to taste.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative here beyond the sugar, and no sterile bottling instruction. Refrigerate it and use within two weeks; a fountain went through a batch in days.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the home cook, which is why the quantities run in pints and pounds and why the instructions assume you already know what to do with the sugar. Hot chocolate and hot beef tea were the winter trade at American fountains from the 1890s onward, when soda water sales collapsed in cold weather and druggists needed something to sell from the same syrup pumps and the same steam-heated urn. The word "improved" in the title is doing ordinary period work: these books ran multiple versions of every formula, each supposedly smoother, less gritty, or less prone to settling than the last, and the improvement claimed here is cooking the cocoa with the water in a double boiler instead of merely stirring cold powder into sugar syrup.