Cocoa
The general rule for cocoa is 2 teaspoons cocoa, 1 cup cold water, 1 teaspoon sugar and cup milk for each cup cocoa desired. Cook the water and cocoa together until thick; add the sugar; stir until dissolved; add milk and boil a minute. cup cocoa 1 cup water
A working formula rather than a fixed recipe: cocoa is cooked with water into a paste before the milk goes in, which is the whole point of the method. Note that the printed text has lost several fractions, so the proportions need judgment.
- The missing fractionsThe line reads "1 cup cold water" and "cup milk," and the trailing note "cup cocoa 1 cup water" is clearly a fragment. Fractions have plainly dropped out of the printed text, so treat the stated amounts as unreliable.
- Why water firstCocoa powder contains some starch, and boiling it briefly in water helps disperse the particles. Skip this and the powder tends to float in lumps on the milk. "Until thick" means cooking the cocoa and water down before the milk goes in.
- Cocoa, not drinking chocolateThis means unsweetened cocoa powder. Natural (non-alkalized) cocoa was widely sold in America at the time; Dutch-process cocoa is darker and less acidic. Either will work here.
- The final boil"Boil a minute" with milk in the pot risks scorching on the bottom and a skin on top. Bring it just to the point of steaming and stir the whole time; nothing is gained by a hard boil once the cocoa is already cooked.
- SugarOne teaspoon per cup is restrained by modern taste. Most people will want two, and it dissolves fastest while the paste is still hot.
- YieldAs written, one cup per set of proportions. The formula scales directly, so multiply through for the number of servings wanted.
- FinishBeating the finished cocoa with a whisk for a few seconds gives it foam and helps keep a skin from forming.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given away to policyholders, part of a broad early twentieth-century effort by insurers to promote household health and nutrition among their customers. That explains the tone of this entry: it is a general rule with a scaling formula rather than a recipe for a treat, and cocoa was widely recommended in the period as a wholesome drink for children and invalids. Powdered cocoa itself became a household staple after the development of hydraulic pressing to remove much of the fat from ground cacao, generally credited to the Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten in the 1820s; the defatted powder is what makes a water-and-milk drink like this one possible at all, since whole ground chocolate simply separates into a greasy layer.