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Plain Chocolate
Have an earthen pot on range with a half pint cold water. Take six (if desired strong, four if desired not quite so strong) tablets of the prepared chocolate, break into powder and add to water, then stir with wooden spoon until thoroughly dissolved. Pour a quart boiling water over, briskly mix with wooden spoon and allow to gently simmer for ten minutes, frequently mixing meanwhile. Pour into a hot pitcher and send to table with six chocolate cups and fine sugar separately.
A water-based drinking chocolate of the Spanish and Latin American type, thickened only by long, gentle simmering. Nearly everything depends on what the "tablets" are.
- The tabletsThese are pressed cakes of ground cacao, sold in scored discs — the sort still sold as Mexican or Spanish chocolate de mesa; such tablets were sometimes sweetened and sometimes spiced with cinnamon, though the sugar handed separately here suggests a plain one. The recipe gives no weight for a tablet. Unsweetened baking chocolate will work, and the sugar sent separately then becomes essential rather than optional.
- MeasuresA half pint is one cup; a quart is four cups, so about five cups of liquid before reduction, divided among the six chocolate cups called for.
- The earthen potEarthenware heats slowly and evenly, which would help keep the cocoa solids from scorching. A heavy saucepan does the same job; a thin pan is more likely to catch on the bottom if left unstirred.
- Dissolve cold firstThis is the hinge of the method. Powdering the chocolate into cold water and working it smooth before any boiling liquid goes in is what prevents lumps and gritty sediment. Chocolate dropped straight into boiling water tends to clump and is difficult to smooth afterwards.
- The ten-minute simmerUnusually long by modern habit, but it reduces and thickens the drink and gives it body. Keep it at a bare tremble and stir often, as the recipe directs; a hard boil risks scorching the solids.
- FrothingThe recipe does not call for it, but traditional practice beats Spanish-style chocolate to a foam with a molinillo or by pouring between two pitchers from a height.
- ServingSix cups, sugar handed separately, and no milk anywhere in the recipe. Adding milk gives a different and much tamer drink.
Drinking chocolate reached Europe from Mesoamerica through Spain in the sixteenth century, and the Spanish habit of making it with water rather than milk, from pressed and spiced tablets, persisted long after northern Europe had turned to milky cocoa. That is what this recipe preserves: the pot, the wooden spoon, the pre-dissolving in cold water and the small cups all belong to a technique older than the cocoa powder that Van Houten's press made cheap in the nineteenth century. The instruction to send sugar separately is a further sign of its origin — the drinker, not the cook, decided how sweet it should be.