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Thoman's Hot Chocolate
Take 1½ pounds good sweet chocolate; grate fine; add 1 gallon milk while stirring; then beat a few minutes with egg beater to make it light and serve with whipped cream. This should be made in porcelain-lined urn, of even temperature, and stir occasionally. Chocolate as a Finished Drink.
This is a most delicious way of making finished chocolate. It is absolutely the only way of fully bringing out that rich chocolate flavor. One pound American Powdered Cocoa, 1 pound sugar, 1 gallon milk, ½ gallon water, ½ ounce vanilla extract. Boil the milk. Put cocoa into another vessel, add half a gallon of the boiled milk and stir until cocoa is thoroughly dissolved. Put this over the fire, let it come to a boil and boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Then mix this with the rest of the boiled milk, add ½ gallon of boiling water and the vanilla extract; then, without further cooking, pour into inside can of hot soda apparatus to keep hot, and dispense as a finished drink in a china cup topped with whipped cream. If this chocolate is too rich for your taste you can add more water. If not sweet enough add more sugar, but never change the method of cooking. Chocolate as a Finished Drink.
Three quarts water, 2 pounds sugar, 2 quarts milk, 1 pound American Powdered Chocolate or 1 quart American Cream Chocolate. Put water into can over slow fire, let it come almost to a boil, add chocolate, milk and sugar; simmer for 5 minutes, pour into urn and keep it hot. Draw this chocolate into cup, add more sugar if desired, and top with whipped cream. To be served from a hot soda apparatus having inside chocolate reservoir.
Three fountain formulas for hot chocolate, written for a dispenser working in gallons and holding the drink hot all day. Scaled down they work fine on a stovetop, but the quantities need reading with care.
- The 11½ pounds is almost certainly an errorEleven and a half pounds of grated sweet chocolate to a gallon of milk would be a paste, not a drink. Read it as 1½ pounds to the gallon, which gives a rich but pourable chocolate; that ratio is consistent with the other two formulas on the page.
- Scaling the second formulaOne pound cocoa, one pound sugar, one gallon milk, half a gallon water and half an ounce vanilla makes about a gallon and a half, or roughly twenty-four cups. A sixteenth batch is about 1 oz (a scant ⅓ cup) cocoa, 2 tbsp sugar, 1 cup milk, ½ cup water and a scant ¼ teaspoon of vanilla, serving two or three.
- American Powdered CocoaMost likely plain unsweetened cocoa powder of the natural, non-alkalised sort common in the American trade at the time. Natural cocoa is more acidic and sharper than Dutch-process; either works, and Dutch-process gives a darker, rounder cup.
- American Cream ChocolateA fountain trade product, evidently a liquid or pourable sweetened chocolate preparation, measured here by the quart. It has no direct supermarket equivalent. Substitute a good chocolate syrup and cut the added sugar sharply, tasting as you go.
- The hinge: cook the cocoa paste, not the finished drinkThe instruction to dissolve the cocoa in half the milk and boil that mixture five minutes before combining is the whole point of the method. Boiling hydrates and swells the cocoa starch, which is what thickens the drink and keeps it from settling into grit at the bottom of the cup. The rest is only mixed in and kept hot.
- Vanilla goes in off the heatHalf an ounce is a tablespoon. The recipe adds it after the last boil deliberately, since the aromatics are volatile and simmering drives them off.
- Holding it hotThe inside can of a soda apparatus held the chocolate below a simmer indefinitely. A slow cooker on low or a bain-marie does the same. Stir occasionally, as the first formula says, or a skin forms and the cocoa solids drop.
- Porcelain-lined vesselsProbably specified because bare copper and tinned iron could pick up metallic flavours from hot, slightly acidic cocoa held for hours. Enamelled or stainless pans serve the same purpose now.
Soda fountains were not a summer-only business, and hot chocolate was the standard winter counterweight to the ice-cream soda: the same marble counter, the same apparatus, with the syrup rails swapped for a hot water jacket and an inside can. Books of this type were trade manuals aimed at the dispenser, which is why the measurements come in gallons and pounds and why the instructions dwell on holding a drink at even temperature through a long day rather than on making a single cup. The powdered cocoa the recipes assume was itself a fairly recent convenience; the press that squeezes most of the fat from the bean, leaving a powder that dissolves in liquid, is generally traced to Coenraad van Houten in the Netherlands in the 1820s, and by 1900 American manufacturers were selling powdered and liquid "cream" chocolates specifically to the fountain trade. The insistence that you may change the water and the sugar but must "never change the method of cooking" reflects hard-won counter experience: an uncooked cocoa mix separates in the urn and grits in the cup.