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Cocoa
(1) Mix three tablespoonfuls of prepared cocoa with one pint of water and one pint of milk, let it boil for twenty minutes, whipping all the time with an egg-whisk. (2) Put one teaspoonful of cocoa into a cup, add a little boiling milk and stir to a paste and sweeten to taste. If preferred, the cup may be nearly filled with water before adding milk.
Two methods: a pot brewed for the table and a single cup mixed to order. Both assume a cocoa powder rather than a chocolate block, and both assume more patience than most cooks now give a hot drink.
- "Prepared cocoa"A cocoa already pressed free of much of its butter and sold ready to use in a tin. Some such powders were alkalised (what a supermarket now sells as Dutch-process), others were not, and some carried added sugar or starch. The first method calls for no sugar; if yours is unsweetened, sugar to taste.
- The twenty-minute boilLong cooking was standard advice because coarse period cocoa had gritty starch that needed time to swell and hydrate. Modern cocoa is milled far finer and is smooth in three or four minutes; twenty minutes at a rolling boil will only reduce the liquid and give the milk a scalded flavour.
- Why the constant whiskingThis is the hinge of the first method. Milk sugars catch on the bottom of the pan and the surface throws a skin of protein and fat; whisking keeps both from forming and holds the cocoa solids in suspension instead of letting them settle into sludge.
- Make a paste firstThe second method states it explicitly and the first benefits from it too. Cocoa powder does not wet out readily in hot liquid — mix it with a spoonful or two of cold or hot liquid to a smooth paste before the rest goes in, or you will be chasing lumps with the whisk.
- Quantities and yieldA pint each of water and milk makes roughly four cups, from only three tablespoons of cocoa. That is a thin, drinkable cocoa in the older style rather than the thick hot chocolate now expected; double the cocoa if you want body.
- The single cupA teaspoon of cocoa to a full cup is thinner still, and the water-then-milk variant thinner again. It reads as a deliberately weak drink, of the kind then thought suitable for invalids and children.
Cocoa as a hot drink separated from chocolate as a hot drink in the nineteenth century, once hydraulic pressing made it possible to remove most of the cocoa butter and grind the remaining cake into powder — a process generally traced to the Van Houten family in the Netherlands, whose alkalising treatment gave the darker, milder "Dutch" powder still named for it. Before that, drinking chocolate meant grating a full-fat block and coping with the fat that rose to the top, which is why older recipes lean so heavily on mills, molinillos and mad whisking. Oscar's two methods sit at the point where cocoa had become a tinned pantry staple: one for a pot brought to a breakfast table, one mixed by the cup to order. Both are far weaker than a modern hot chocolate, reflecting cocoa's standing at the time as a wholesome, nourishing everyday beverage rather than a dessert in a cup.