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Vienna Chocolate
Scald 3 cups of milk and 1 cup of cream, add 3 heaping tablespoonfuls of grated chocolate, 2 of sugar, the same of cornstarch, and a teaspoonful of vanilla. Stir until smooth, cook 5 minutes more, beat the whites of 2 eggs very stiff with a spoonful of sugar. Add a spoonful to each cup when serving the chocolate.
A thickened drinking chocolate in the Viennese manner, finished with a spoonful of meringue rather than whipped cream. The one thing that decides whether it works is how the cornstarch goes in.
- Slake the cornstarch firstThe recipe's 'the same of cornstarch' reads as two heaping tablespoons, matching the sugar. Cornstarch stirred straight into hot milk will seize into lumps; whisk it smooth with a few tablespoons of the cold milk before it meets the scalded liquid, then cook the full five minutes so the raw starch flavour cooks out.
- ScaldingScald means heating to about 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge and steam rises. It is not a boil, and boiling the mixture hard after the starch goes in will thin it again.
- The chocolate'Grated chocolate' in a book of this period usually meant a block of plain baking chocolate rather than chips or couverture, though sweetened cakes of chocolate were also sold. Three heaping tablespoons is roughly an ounce. With only 2 tablespoons of sugar against it, the result may taste bitter by modern standards; taste and add sugar before serving.
- Vanilla timingThe original adds the vanilla with the chocolate, sugar and cornstarch, before the five minutes' cooking. Its flavour is volatile; stirring it in off the heat at the end keeps more of it.
- The egg whitesThe whites are beaten with sugar and floated on the hot chocolate uncooked. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites, or top with lightly sweetened whipped cream as the Viennese cafés generally do.
- YieldAbout four cups of finished chocolate.
Vienna's coffeehouses built their reputation as much on chocolate as on coffee, and the house style has long been a thick, dark drink crowned with something white and soft — traditionally Schlagobers, the whipped cream that arrives on almost everything in the city. The meringue here uses up whites and gives a similar visual finish. Starch-thickened bodies were characteristic of nineteenth-century drinking chocolate generally, before the spread of alkalized cocoa powder made a lighter cup the norm.