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Mild Chocolate for Invalids
1221. Take one square of chocolate (the sixth part of a cake), shave it, and boil a pint of water five minutes; then add a pint of skimmed milk; boil them together a little while; then add a tea-spoonful of arrowroot wetted with cold water, and boil it very slowly for five minutes longer.
A thin drinking chocolate thickened with arrowroot, meant for a sickroom rather than a treat. The whole point is that it is bland and easily digested, so expect something closer to a warm gruel than to modern hot cocoa.
- The chocolateThis is almost certainly plain chocolate: ground cacao pressed into a moulded cake, with no milk solids and little or no sugar. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, not a sweetened bar and not drinking-chocolate powder, or the result will be far richer than intended.
- "One square (the sixth part of a cake)"Cake weights were not standardised, so this is genuinely ambiguous. Around 1 oz (30 g) for the quart of liquid gives the mild strength the title promises.
- Shave itGrating or shaving is not decorative. Solid unsweetened chocolate in a lump will sit at the bottom of the pan and scorch; fine shavings disperse in the boiling water and hydrate properly.
- Why the water goes in firstBoiling the chocolate in water alone disperses the cocoa solids and cooks out the raw starchy taste before any milk is present. Milk added at the start would be far more likely to catch on the pan bottom during five minutes of hard boiling.
- Arrowroot slurryWetting the arrowroot with cold water before it goes in is the hinge of the recipe — stirred in dry it will seize into lumps. Arrowroot also thins if held at a rolling boil, which is why the last five minutes are specified as very slow; a bare simmer with stirring is right.
- Skimmed milkSkimming was likely a matter of digestibility as much as economy. Modern skim milk works as written; 1% or 2% will give a slightly fuller body without making it heavy.
- Sweetening and yieldNo sugar is called for, and unsweetened chocolate in water is bracingly bitter to a modern palate. Sweeten to taste at the end if serving it as a drink. The quantities make about a quart, four cups — two generous servings or several small sickroom cups.
Nineteenth-century cookery books commonly carried a section of "invalid cookery," dishes for the sick and convalescent at a time when nursing happened at home and the kitchen supplied much of the treatment. The governing idea was that illness weakened the digestion, so foods were diluted, skimmed, strained and thickened with bland starches — arrowroot, sago, tapioca. Arrowroot, the starch of the West Indian Maranta arundinacea, was prized precisely because it was thought the gentlest of them all, and it appears throughout Victorian sickroom recipes in puddings, jellies and gruels. Chocolate had a longstanding reputation as a restorative and nourishing drink rather than a confection, which is how it earns a place here; diluting it with water and using skimmed milk was one common way to make it "mild" enough for a patient.