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Cracked Cocoa
3 pints boiling water ½ cup cracked cocoa Boil cracked cocoa and water two hours. Strain, and serve with milk and sugar. If cocoa is pounded in a mortar and soaked over night in three pints water, it will require but one hour's boiling.
This is a steeped beverage rather than a chocolate drink in the modern sense: the nibs give up their aroma and a little fat to the water, and the solids are strained out and discarded. Expect something closer to a dark, faintly bitter tea than to hot cocoa.
- What "cracked cocoa" isRoasted cacao beans broken into coarse pieces, sold today as cocoa nibs. They are not cocoa powder and not cocoa shells ("cocoa tea" or cocoa shell tea was the cheaper cousin, made from the husks). Powder cannot be substituted here; it will not strain out.
- Quantities3 pints is 6 cups, or about 1.4 litres. A cup and a half of nibs weighs roughly 6 oz / 170 g. That makes about six cups of liquid before reduction, less if the boil is long.
- The two-hour boilLong simmering is what extracts flavour from whole nibs, but it also drives off a lot of water. Keep it at a bare simmer with a lid slightly ajar and top up with boiling water to hold the volume near 3 pints, or the result will be sharp and over-concentrated.
- The overnight soakThe second method is the quicker one at the stove. Pounding the nibs in a mortar, or pulsing them briefly in a spice grinder, exposes more surface; an overnight soak in the cold water then does part of the extraction and cuts the boil to an hour.
- StrainingCocoa butter renders out during the boil and floats. Strain through a fine sieve lined with muslin, and skim if you prefer a leaner cup.
- ServingMilk and sugar are not boiled in; the recipe adds them at serving, so the strength can be judged in the cup.
Fannie Farmer's book gives cocoa in several grades, and cracked cocoa sits at the top of the ladder in labour: whole roasted beans, broken but not ground, boiled for hours and strained. By the 1890s the Dutch process for alkalised powder and the manufacture of pressed cocoa cakes had made prepared cocoa widely available in American groceries, so a recipe like this one survives partly as economy and partly as habit from the days when chocolate came into the kitchen as a bean or a hard block. The nibs of the period were mostly Caribbean and South American in origin, roasted and cracked by New England mills. Cocoa was regarded in the household literature of the period as a nourishing drink suitable for children and invalids, which is why it is treated as a staple beverage here alongside tea and coffee rather than as a treat.