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Cocoa Shells
1 cup cocoa shells 6 cups boiling water Boil shells and water three hours; as water boils away it will be necessary to add more. Strain, and serve with milk and sugar. By adding one-third cup cocoa nibs, a much more satisfactory drink is obtained.
A thrift drink made from the husks winnowed off roasted cacao beans, extracted by long boiling rather than steeping. It works, but almost everything about the method reflects the weakness of the raw material.
- What cocoa shells areThey are the papery hulls removed from roasted cacao beans before the nibs are ground. Today they are sold as cacao shells, cocoa husk tea, or cascara de cacao by chocolate makers and specialty roasters.
- Buy food-grade onlyCocoa shell is also sold in large bags as garden mulch. That grade is not cleaned or handled as food and should never go in a pot.
- The three-hour boilShells hold very little soluble matter, so the original brute-forces the extraction and tops up the water as it evaporates. Modern cacao-shell tea is usually simmered 10 to 20 minutes for a lighter, less bitter cup; the long boil gives a darker, woodier brew closer to what the book intends.
- Keep the volume upSix cups over three hours will reduce hard. Add boiling water as it goes, not cold, and expect to finish with roughly what you started with, or you will have something closer to a bitter syrup.
- The nibs are the pointThe optional one-third cup of cocoa nibs is what turns thin husk water into a drink that tastes of chocolate. Add them and the brew carries real cocoa butter and flavor; skip them and it is close to a mild, malty tea.
- Strain properlyShells shed fine grit and fragments. Strain through a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth or a coffee filter, or the last inch of every cup will be sediment.
- Yield and servingAbout five to six cups if you keep the water topped up, served hot with milk and sugar to taste. It is low in caffeine compared with coffee, though it contains both caffeine and theobromine, so treat it as you would a light tea.
- A note on dogsCocoa shell and the spent grounds are toxic to dogs for the same reason chocolate is. Bin the strained solids where the dog cannot reach them rather than composting them in an open heap.
Cocoa shells were a byproduct of chocolate manufacture, and in New England they were a genuinely cheap grocery item: the great chocolate mills of the Boston area, Walter Baker & Company at Dorchester chief among them, winnowed off husk in the course of making eating and drinking chocolate, and the husk was bagged and sold cheaply. A cup of shells and water gave a household a warm, faintly chocolate-flavored drink at a fraction of the price of cocoa itself, and the recipe sits in the Boston Cooking School book alongside proper cocoa and chocolate rather than as a curiosity. The appended line about adding nibs is the honest admission built into the recipe: shells alone make a thin beverage, and the book tells you plainly what it costs to make it good. Cacao husk has come back into fashion in recent years as a tea sold by craft chocolate makers, generally on the same logic of using the whole bean.