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Reception Cocoa
3 tablespoons cocoa 1/4 cup sugar A few grains salt 4 cups milk ¾ cup boiling water Scald milk. Mix cocoa, sugar, and salt, adding enough boiling water to make a smooth paste; add remaining water and boil five minutes; pour into scalded milk. Beat two minutes, using egg-beater.
A hot cocoa built as a syrup first, then thinned with scalded milk — the method that gives smooth, un-gritty cocoa without a skin on top.
- The hinge: boil the pasteThe five minutes of boiling in water is what cooks the cocoa through and takes off its raw, chalky edge; cocoa stirred straight into hot milk tends to taste dusty and settle in the cup.
- Water quantityThe water figure has lost its fraction in this printing; 3/4 cup is the standard measure for this proportion of cocoa, added in two stages — a spoonful or two to make the paste, the rest to boil.
- CocoaUse unsweetened cocoa powder, not a sweetened drinking-chocolate mix. The sugar here is already accounted for.
- Scalding milkBring the milk to about 180F, just until it steams and shivers at the edges. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim will taste thin.
- The two-minute beatingWhisking aerates the drink to a light froth and, incidentally, keeps a skin from forming. A hand whisk or milk frother does the same work as the old rotary egg-beater.
- YieldAbout 4 3/4 cups. Hold it in a double boiler if it must wait; direct heat will scorch the milk solids.
This one is named for the afternoon reception — the at-home receiving day that structured middle-class social life in turn-of-the-century Boston, where hot cocoa in small cups was poured alongside tea for callers who did not want coffee. Cocoa had become a household staple only a generation or two earlier: the invention of the press that removed most of the cocoa butter from roasted beans made a powder that would mix with hot liquid, and by the 1890s American firms were selling it in tins. The frothing step recalls much older chocolate-drinking practice, when a wooden molinillo or a swizzle stick was used to whip the cup to a foam before serving.