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Chocolate III
Few grains salt Whipped cream 2 ozs. sweetened chocolate 4 cups milk Scald milk, add chocolate, and stir until chocolate is melted. Bring to boiling-point, mill, and serve in chocolate cups with whipped cream sweetened and flavored. 1 cup sugar
A four-cup hot chocolate, thickened by nothing but the chocolate itself and finished with froth. The ingredient list as printed has been scrambled by the typesetting, so read the method first and let it govern.
- The sugar is a printing artifactThe method never adds sugar, and a cup of it in four cups of milk with already-sweetened chocolate would be undrinkable. Treat the sugar line as belonging to a neighbouring recipe, or add a tablespoon or two to taste if your chocolate is dark.
- "Sweetened chocolate"This means a solid eating or baking chocolate with sugar in it, not cocoa powder and not modern milk chocolate. A semisweet bar is the closest modern stand-in; 2 ounces is roughly a third of a cup chopped, and more than that grated.
- "Mill" is the hingeMilling means whipping the hot chocolate to a foam with a wooden chocolate mill (molinillo) spun between the palms. A small whisk, an immersion blender for a few seconds, or a hand frother does the same job. Without it you get the drink but not the froth the step exists to raise.
- Scald, then don't boil hardScalding is heating the milk to about 180F, when it steams and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. Bringing it just to the boiling point after the chocolate melts is enough; a rolling boil will scorch the milk solids and dull the flavour.
- Chocolate cupsThese are the tall, narrow cups of a chocolate pot service, roughly 3 to 4 ounces each, smaller than a teacup. Four cups of milk fills eight to ten of them, or four ordinary mugs.
- Flavoring the creamThe recipe leaves the flavoring open. Vanilla is the obvious choice; almond or a grating of cinnamon are also possible. Add it after the cream is whipped.
- Few grains saltA pinch, less than an eighth of a teaspoon. The recipe does not say when to add it; with the milk is the obvious point. It sharpens the chocolate rather than making the drink taste salted.
The book gives several numbered chocolate recipes in a row, each a slight variation -- some built on cocoa, some on solid chocolate -- because drinking chocolate was still a distinct household beverage with its own equipment: a lipped chocolate pot, tall narrow cups, and a wooden mill pushed through a hole in the lid. The milling step descends directly from Spanish colonial practice, which took it in turn from Mesoamerican cooks who poured chocolate between vessels to raise a foam; the foam was the point long before sugar and milk were. By the time this book appeared, cocoa powder produced by the Dutch alkalizing process was cheaper and easier, and recipes like this one melted a whole sweetened bar into scalded milk.