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Reception Chocolate
1 quart milk
½ cup sugar
½ cup cocoa
½ teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup flour
⅛ teaspoon salt
1 quart water
Mix dry ingredients and make a smooth paste with some of the water. Pour on the remainder of the water and boil slowly for fifteen minutes. Combine with the milk, bring to the boilingpoint. Add vanilla. Serve with whipped cream. This is a very thick, thick, rich cocoa.
A flour-thickened cocoa built for a punch bowl or an urn at a reception, where it had to stay hot and stay rich. Two things carry it: cooking the flour paste long enough, and keeping the milk below a hard boil.
- Cook the flour outThe fifteen-minute slow boil is not incidental. It gelatinizes and cooks the starch so the finished drink is glossy rather than pasty, and it removes the raw-flour taste. Cut it short and the cocoa tastes of gravy.
- Which cocoaHere "cocoa" means unsweetened powdered cocoa, in an American household of this period most likely natural (non-alkalized), which is more acidic and sharper than Dutch-process. Either works; Dutch-process gives a darker, mellower cup.
- ScorchingA flour-and-cocoa slurry catches on the bottom of a thin pan easily. Use a heavy saucepan over low heat and stir often, or set the pan in a wider pan of simmering water once the water phase is done.
- "Bring to the boiling-point"Once the milk goes in, take it just to the first shiver of a boil and stop. Held at a rolling boil the milk proteins skin over and the sugars scorch against the pan.
- Vanilla lastThe recipe adds it after the drink reaches the boiling point; adding it off the heat is safest, since vanilla's aromatics are volatile and boiling drives much of them off.
- YieldAbout two quarts before boiling, somewhat less after the fifteen-minute reduction: roughly eight cups, or a larger number of small punch-cup servings.
- Holding itIt thickens further as it cools. Thin with hot milk when reheating, and reheat gently rather than boiling again.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of sugar to two quarts is restrained by modern standards, with the whipped cream on top adding richness. Taste before serving if you plan to leave the cream off.
Cocoa thickened with flour or arrowroot appears in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century: it stretched an expensive imported ingredient, gave the drink body without more cream, and — useful for a reception — helped keep the cocoa solids in suspension instead of settling to the bottom of the urn. The book belongs to the era when powdered cocoa, made possible by the hydraulic press that separated cocoa butter from the bean, had become cheap enough for ordinary households, and when the afternoon reception with its table of sweets and hot drinks was part of middle-class social life. The name is the point: this is the company version, deliberately thick, poured into small cups and crowned with whipped cream. The doubled "thick, thick" in the last line reads like an author making sure no one mistook it for anything else.