Home › Beverages › Cocoa Syrup
Cocoa Syrup
1/2 cup cocoa 1/4 teaspoon salt teaspoon salt 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon vanilla Cook cocoa and water together until it is smooth and thick. Add sugar and salt and cook a few minutes longer. Add butter and vanilla, the sauce may be kept in jars and used for pudding or ice cream sauce or the basis of iced cocoa.
A basic chocolate syrup of the type kept on hand for milk drinks and puddings before bottled syrup was a supermarket staple. The method matters more than exact proportions here.
- Cocoa and water are not specifiedThe ingredient list as printed begins mid-line, so the amounts of cocoa and water are unknown. A workable ratio for a pourable syrup with 1 cup sugar is roughly 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa to 1 cup water; treat that as a reconstruction, not the original.
- SaltThe salt quantity has lost its fraction. For 1 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon is the sensible reading; a full teaspoon would be assertively salty.
- Cocoa here means unsweetened powderIn a book of this period "cocoa" is plain unsweetened cocoa powder, not drinking chocolate or a sweetened mix. Natural (non-alkalised) cocoa was the more usual product, though Dutch-process was also available; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder syrup.
- Smooth before hotWhisk the cocoa into cold or barely warm water first. Cocoa dropped into hot liquid clumps and the lumps will not break down later.
- How long to cook"A few minutes longer" is probably on the order of 3 to 5 minutes at a gentle boil, stirring. Cooked much further, the syrup will thicken noticeably as it cools.
- Butter and vanilla go in off the heatBoth are added after cooking. Vanilla extract loses aroma to a boil, and the butter is there for gloss and body rather than flavour.
- StorageThis is not a preserved product despite the mention of jars. Refrigerate it in a covered jar and use within two to three weeks; the butter and the modest sugar concentration will not keep it at room temperature.
- Yield and useOn the reconstructed proportions above this makes roughly 1 1/2 cups; the original yield cannot be known. For iced cocoa, allow about 2 tablespoons per glass of cold milk, stirred hard or shaken.
Cocoa syrup belongs to the era when powdered cocoa was cheap and reliable but ready-made chocolate sauce was less common on the shelf. Making a jar of syrup solved several problems at once: it dissolved in cold milk, which plain cocoa powder does poorly, and it doubled as a pudding and ice-cream sauce. The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed free to policyholders, part of a broad early-twentieth-century campaign in which insurers promoted home economics and nutrition as a form of preventive health work. Recipes in such books lean deliberately toward the thrifty and the multi-purpose, and a single preparation that served three ends was exactly the kind of housekeeping the publishers meant to encourage.