No. 3608

Iced Chocolate

Chocolat Glace

Dissolve a pound of sweet chocolate in a quart of water with half a bean of vanilla; when cold stir in a quart of cream, then strain through a fine sieve.

Another way is to take a pound of sweet chocolate, half a pint of water and half a vanilla bean; when the chocolate is all dissolved and cold mix into it three pints of cream and a gill of thirty-two degree syrup; strain through a sieve and put it into a freezer with lightly salted ice around, and serve in glasses.

← No. 3607 Strawberry or Raspberry Water Ice Iced Drinks No. 3609 Iced Coffee →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two versions of the same thing: a chocolate drink either poured cold over ice or churned briefly to a slush. Neither is ice cream, and the difference between the two lies entirely in how long it stays in the freezer.

Stop churning earlyThe recipe gives no timing, only "a freezer with lightly salted ice around" and service in glasses, which points to stopping while the mixture is still thick and pourable rather than firm. Pull it when a spoon still slides through it easily.
"Sweet chocolate"This means sweetened eating chocolate, not unsweetened baking chocolate. A pound of dark chocolate in the 45-55 percent range is the closest match; a modern 70 percent bar will make the drink noticeably bitter and much thicker.
Dissolving the chocolateChop it and melt it into the water over low heat, stirring to a smooth paste rather than dropping it in whole. A pound of chocolate in half a pint of water, as in the second version, becomes a stiff ganache-like mass; work it patiently and it will loosen when the cream goes in.
Thirty-two degree syrupA density reading on the Baume scale, standard in nineteenth-century pastry kitchens. It is a heavy sugar syrup, about 60 percent sugar by weight -- roughly three parts sugar to two parts water -- boiled just until clear. A gill of it is half a cup.
The vanillaHalf a bean, split lengthwise and steeped in the hot water with the chocolate, then removed before straining. Half a teaspoon of extract stirred in off the heat is a fair substitute, though it will not give the same speckled infusion.
CreamPeriod cream generally ran lighter than today's heavy cream. Half-and-half, or heavy cream cut with milk, gives a drinkable consistency; straight heavy cream in these quantities makes something closer to a chocolate custard base.
Salted ice"Lightly salted" is deliberate. A heavy salt-to-ice ratio drops the temperature fast and freezes the mixture solid against the canister wall, which is what you want for ice cream and not for this. Coarse salt used sparingly, with steady cranking, keeps it slushy.
YieldEach version comes to roughly two quarts, the second if anything marginally less, enough for eight to ten glasses. Both are better made and chilled well ahead.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working reference, which is why iced chocolate sits in a run of numbered entries beside strawberry water ice and iced coffee rather than standing alone as a novelty. Cold chocolate drinks were a summer staple of the nineteenth-century restaurant and confectioner's counter, and the availability of ice in quantity, cut in winter and stored in insulated houses, is what made a whole chapter of iced drinks practical for a city kitchen. The instruction to specify syrup by degrees Baume marks the recipe as professional writing: a cook working from these pages was assumed to keep a saccharometer and a standing tub of syrup at hand, the way a modern line cook keeps simple syrup in a squeeze bottle.