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Vienna Chocolate
Put into a coffee-pot set in boiling water, one quart of new milk (or a pint each of cream and milk), stir into it three heaping tablespoons grated chocolate mixed to a paste with cold milk, let it boil two or three minutes, and serve at once. To make good chocolate , good materials are required. season.
A double-boiler drinking chocolate, thicker and richer than cocoa powder made with water. The whole method turns on the paste made before anything hot touches the chocolate.
- Make the paste firstGrated chocolate dropped straight into hot milk clumps and scorches. Work it smooth with a little cold milk to a loose paste, then stir that into the heated milk.
- The coffee-pot in boiling waterThis is effectively a double boiler. Use a heatproof bowl or a smaller pan set over an inch of simmering water; the milk never touches direct heat, so it is much less likely to catch on the bottom.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, unskimmed. The alternative given, a pint each of cream and milk, produces something closer to a dessert than a beverage.
- "Grated chocolate"In this period this meant a hard cake of chocolate, sold in blocks and grated as needed; such cakes could be plain or sweetened. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped fine or grated, if you want to control the sugar yourself; modern sweetened drinking chocolate will likely be sweeter than intended.
- SugarThe recipe never mentions it, and the trailing word "season" is an unexplained fragment. With unsweetened chocolate you will want roughly a tablespoon of sugar per cup, added with the paste, plus a pinch of salt.
- The two or three minutesOver a water bath the mixture will not reach a rolling boil; what you want is for it to thicken slightly and lose any raw, chalky taste. Longer does not improve it and dulls the milk.
- Yield and servingA quart serves four generously in small cups. Whisk hard before pouring to raise a little froth; a spoonful of whipped cream on top is a common Viennese association, though the recipe itself does not call for it.
Chocolate drunk hot and thick with milk was a Continental habit long before cocoa powder made it cheap, and Vienna's coffee houses were famous for serving it alongside coffee, crowned with whipped cream — the association that gives this recipe its name rather than any particular Austrian original. American cookbooks of the 1880s, The Dixie Cook-Book among them, worked with two distinct things: "chocolate" made from grated cake chocolate, which carried its own cocoa butter and needed milk to carry it, and "cocoa" made from the defatted powder Van Houten's press, patented in 1828, had made available. The book closes with the line "To make good chocolate, good materials are required" — and adulterated chocolate, padded with starch, flour or ground shells, was certainly common on the market in the period.