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Chocolate
Chocolate may be bought in cakes and may be had either sweet or plain. Allow one ounce to a cupful. Grate the chocolate and melt it over the fire in a cupful of water, stirring until the chocolate is dissolved; then add a cupful of milk, keeping on stirring until it boils, when it is ready for use.
A hotel-standard cup of drinking chocolate, built the old way: chocolate dissolved in water first, milk added second. The order matters more than anything else here.
- Dissolve in water firstThe water step makes a smooth paste that then thins evenly when the milk goes in; this is the order the recipe insists on.
- What "cakes" of chocolate wereChocolate at this date was sold in hard moulded blocks, either "plain" (unsweetened) or "sweet" (sweetened). Use a 4 oz bar of unsweetened or bittersweet chocolate and chop it finely rather than grating, unless you want the practice.
- The quantity is ambiguousThe rule is one ounce per cupful, but the method calls for one cup of water plus one cup of milk, which yields about two cups. Two ounces is the sensible reading; one ounce gives a thin, watery drink by modern taste.
- SweeteningIf you use plain chocolate the finished drink has no sugar at all. Add about a tablespoon of sugar per cup along with the chocolate and water, and a pinch of salt, which sharpens the chocolate flavour noticeably.
- Do not hard-boil it"Until it boils" means until it just reaches the boil. Held at a rolling boil, the milk skins over, catches on the bottom of the pan and takes on a cooked flavour. Bring it up, then pull it off the heat.
- Froth before servingA minute of hard whisking, or a few pulses with a stick blender, lightens the body and holds the cocoa solids in suspension so they do not settle in the cup. The recipe does not call for this; the molinillo and the chocolate mill belong to the Spanish tradition of beaten chocolate.
- YieldTwo generous cups, or four small after-dinner servings. It thickens as it cools; thin with a splash of hot milk if reheating.
Oscar Tschirky's book was published in 1896, when "chocolate" on a hotel menu still often meant a drink rather than a confection. The water-then-milk method he gives descends from the Spanish and French tradition of chocolate beaten in a pot with a mill, and it survived in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century. The instruction to buy chocolate "in cakes" is a reminder that Dutch-process cocoa powder, though available, had not yet displaced solid chocolate as the household default.