Chocolate
Take six table-spoons scraped chocolate, or three of chocolate and three of cocoa, dissolve in a quart of boiling water, boil hard fifteen minutes, add one quart of rich milk, let scald and serve hot; this is enough for six persons. Cocoa can also be made after this recipe. Some boil either cocoa or chocolate only one minute and then serve, while others make it the day before using, boiling it for one hour, and when cool skimming off the oil, and when wanted for use, heat it to the boiling point and add the milk. In this way it is equally good and much more wholesome. Cocoa is from the seed of the 'fruit of a small tropical tree. There are several forms in which it is sold, the most nutritious and convenient being chocolate, the next cocoa, then cocoa nibs, and last cocoa shells. The ground bean is simply cocoa; ground fine and mixed with sugar it is chocolate; the beans broken into bits are "nibs." The shells are the shells of the bean, usually removed before grinding. The beans are roasted like coffee, and ground between hot rollers.
A block-chocolate drink from the era before instant cocoa powder, when chocolate came as a hard cake to be scraped or grated. The proportions still work; the boiling times do not.
- "Scraped chocolate" means a solid cakeNineteenth-century cooking chocolate was sold in hard cakes or bricks, sometimes plain and sometimes already sweetened (this book's own glossary treats sugar as part of "chocolate"), and was grated with a knife or rasp. Six tablespoons of scrapings is very roughly 1.5 to 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped fine. Modern chocolate bars with milk solids and emulsifiers behave differently and are more likely to separate or scorch.
- Sugar is assumed, not statedThe text distinguishes cocoa (plain ground bean) from chocolate (ground and mixed with sugar), so a period cook using true chocolate got sweetness with it. If you use unsweetened chocolate or cocoa powder, expect to add 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar per quart of water, to taste.
- Fifteen minutes of hard boiling is too longSuch long boiling was presumably suited to coarser, less refined chocolate; modern chocolate and Dutched cocoa hydrate in a minute or two, and long hard boiling only drives off aroma and risks scorching. The recipe's own alternative -- one minute, then serve -- is the one to follow.
- The overnight method and the "oil"The fat skimmed off after cooling is cocoa butter. Old chocolate cakes carried far more of it than today's Dutch-process cocoa, which is largely defatted, so there is little to skim from a modern batch. The claim that it is "more wholesome" reflects period suspicion of rich fats, not a keeping advantage.
- Smooth it before it heatsMake a paste of the chocolate or cocoa with a few spoonfuls of the hot water first, then thin with the rest. Dropping dry powder into a quart of boiling water gives lumps that no amount of boiling will break up.
- Scald means just short of a boilBring the milk-and-chocolate mixture to about 180F, when the surface shivers and steam rises. Boiling it after the milk goes in produces a skin and a cooked-milk flavour.
- YieldA quart of water plus a quart of milk gives eight cups; the original calls that six servings, which suggests generous cups rather than dainty ones.
This entry sits at the point where drinking chocolate was giving way to eating chocolate. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries chocolate commonly reached households as a hard cake meant to be dissolved in liquid, and the long boiling in this recipe probably carries over from the older handling of coarsely ground, high-fat chocolate that had to be worked into water before milk was added. The little glossary at the end -- nibs, shells, cocoa, chocolate -- was practical information for a period cook, when a grocer might offer all four at very different prices, and cocoa shells in particular were used for a thin, cheap beverage. The defatting process that produced modern cocoa powder is generally traced to the Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten early in the century, and its spread is what eventually made the overnight skimming step described here unnecessary.