Because of the enormity of the topic, and the fact that one could write a book (and indeed, many have) on the topic of chocolate through the ages, I’m choosing instead this month to focus on one very specific era and form of chocolate. The trail from Mayan consumption of chocolate to chocolate chip cookies and hipster dudes trying to pass off mass-produced chocolate as organic bean-to-wrapper that is TOTALLY worth $10 a bar is a long, long path to recount.
The super short version is that Cortes was served a drinking chocolate in Tenocitlan, and the drink worked its way through Europe. In London, it was first served in 1657, and by the end of the 17th century, drinking chocolate was available in New England.
Hannah Glasse’s recipe in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy isn’t… that plain or easy.
How to make chocolate:
“Take six pounds of cocoa nuts, one pound of anise seeds, four ounces of long pepper, one of cinnamon, a quarter of a pound of almonds, one pound of pistachios, as much achiote* as will make it the color of brick, three grains of musk and as much ambergrease, six pounds of loaf sugar, one ounce of nutmegs [sic], dry and beat them, and searce them through a fine sieve; your almonds must be beat to a fine paste and mixed with the other ingredients; then dip your sugar in orange-flower or rose-water, and put it on a skillet, on a very gentle charcoal fire, then put in the spice, and stew it well together, the musk and ambergrease, then put the cocao nuts last and then achiote, wetting it with the water the sugar was dipt to; stew all of these very well together, over a hotter fire than before; than take it up, and put it into boxes, or what form you like and set it to dry in a warm place. The pistachios and almonds must be a little beat in a mortar than ground upon a stone.”
*Achiote is another word for amatto, which is a Latin American spice that was exported to Europe for the purpose of coloring and flavoring chocolate.
Were I to try to recreate this recipe, I would probably have to diagram the sentence to figure out the order of what gets tossed into the skillet when. There are a number of other recipes that follow the same idea: cocoa nuts (not coconuts, that is a very different thing) plus spices, melted together.
HOWEVER, I don’t have to recreate it. I can be a middle-class colonial-era Bostonian woman and go down to Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop, near the Old North Church, and BUY IT.
YESSS. I am perfectly spoiled living here with all of our history and recreationists of many eras, and I know it.
At Captain Jackson’s, they sell chocolate made by American Heritage Historic Chocolate (a division of Mars) from a very similar recipe: cocoa beans, cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg, chili pepper, anise, orange zest, salt, and annatto, as well as a small amount of sugar.
They also have costumed interpreters and a blog and samples and it’s basically the best.
Historically, if you wanted to make drinking chocolate, you’d need a chocolate pot- they were tall, and had a hand spun frother.
Goose Bay makes a very handsome copper reproduction, which is the same kind Captain Jackson’s uses for demonstration. It costs over $200, so I don’t have one. Jas Townsend makes a redware pottery one, and includes a video of how to use it over a campfire (I do not know how well it would work on a stove.) But that’s how you make the drinking chocolate: grated chocolate, water, heat, froth, drink.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID051QOf6ug
Modernly, you can use a milk frother or one of those tiny whisks. (Alton Brown may have yelled “UNITASKER!” in my head). Or also you can get just the stick and get a
Or also you can get just the stick and get a molinillo, a Mexican chocolate stirrer.
Hannah Glasse also has a recipe for Sham Chocolate:
“Take a pot of milk, boil it over a slow fire, with some whole cinnamon, and sweeten it up with Lisbon sugar; beat up the yolk of three eggs, and throw it all together in a chocolate pot, and mill to one way, or it will turn. Serve it up in chocolate cups.”
That sounds like a warm custard to me, and not chocolate-y at all, but maybe putting it in the chocolate cups makes it seem more chocolate-y? IDK.
Anyway, I got an adorable little stick of chocolate and then realized when I got home that there aren’t any directions on how much liquid is needed to make this into a drinkable thing. Nor are there any obvious places on the website that gives any direction. So I had to guess.
Grated it up, put it in a pot (the smallest pot we have…)
Added a small teacup’s worth of water and whisked until it melted and got frothy.
It sure LOOKS like drinking chocolate, and it tasted like a shadow of drinking chocolate. The water proportion was too high, and yes, it would have been better with milk but I don’t actually have any right now. I do wish there were some indications about proportions.
THAT SAID, it’s tasty as fuck- more depth of flavor than unspiced hot chocolate and just more deliciousness in general. I highly recommend it.
Lovely! But now I’ll have to head back up to Boston – I missed this shop when I was there two years ago. Bright side; I’ve been looking for an excuse to get back up there.
Meanwhile, I may poke around Williamsburg to see if they’ve got anything similar. (No, I don’t live in Williamsburg – I wish! – but it’s closer, and I visit on the regular.)
So sorry to do this, really, but it is a pet peeve and I can’t help myself. “Enormity” means something that is evil, not big. Suggest revising the introductory sentence, unless you really do think that chocolate is evil, in which case, I stand corrected (and confused, because — chocolate).
Colonial Williamsburg also features American Heritage Chocolate – you can get samples in the coffee house, and they sell it in the market.
I sometimes get the Mexican chocolate that’s especially used to make drinking chocolate. It comes in round pieces, that break into wedges, the box looks like this https://kathleeniscookinginmexico.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/ibarra-chocolate-ice-cream-013.jpg
When I visited family in Columbia, they made chocolate like this for breakfast every morning, using the molinillo. They always made it with milk, not water.
It’s already got cinnamon and maybe a couple other things added to it. but I think I will try adding some of those extra spices you listed. I already have achiote in the house, it’s used in Spanish cooking to make yellow rice, a cheap substitute for saffron.
I think the use of enormity in this context, to suggest the monstrous size of the topic of chocolate, is well within common usage. This website http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2012/11/20/the-enormity-of-a-usage-problem/ examines the problem and quotes from the Merriam Webster dictionary…Quite often enormity will be used to suggest a size that is beyond normal bounds, a size that is unexpectedly great. Hence the notion of monstrousness may creep in, but without the notion of wickedness. . . .In many instances the notion of great size is colored by aspects of the first sense of enormity as defined in Webster’s Second. One common figurative use blends together notions of immoderateness, excess, and monstrousness to suggest a size that is daunting or overwhelming.
Thank you so much Kathy — will do!
I think I’ve been ruined for Swiss Miss. I just checked it out and American Heritage Chocolate sells through their webpage. Washington’s Mount Vernon is the merchant, unless the site is sending me there because I am in Virginia.
And if you’re in Boston this winter, there’s a restaurant in the Back Bay offering a flight of hot chocolate, so…. just thought y’all would think this is relevant to your interests.
http://www.metbackbay.com/special-happenings/boston-hot-chocolate-experience
And then the lazy ones among us walk over to the little market across the street and buy Abuelita and just use that.
That shop/museum is so cool!!! And, obviously, smells fantastic. I thought they sold tins of easier-to-prepare drinking chocolate, though? No grating required…?
I never knew about that place in the north end and I am so excited now.
I was so excited to find out about Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop. I live just outside Boston, and I was all set to head right out and go there today. They’re closed until February. I guess I’ll have to wait to make an excursion there; till then, my tin of Trader Joe’s Sipping Chocolate will have to do.
This just reaffirms my request with my favorite coworkers that our road trip should be to Boston. So glad you posted this because Christmas recency romances are all about the drinking chocolate. Now I have an actual knowledge of it instead of trying not to imaginine some milk and Swiss Miss
Last year, my brother gave me a lump of chocolate from Trinidad, and I grated it with the intent of making hot cocoa. I mixed it with milk. And stirred. And stirred. And.. gave up when there were small pieces that refused to melt. It might have been because I used lactose free milk. It tasted great, though.
So now I stick to making cocoa by mixing milk, cocoa powder, cinnamon and brown sugar . ( Very tasty.)
Oh, I totally forgot to mention, there are 3 historical mysteries by Andrea Penrose that have a lot of chocolate lore, and recipes in front of every chapter. Really good recipes. The first one is “Sweet Revenge” and here’s the setup:
“Lady Arianna Hadley’s desire to discover her disgraced father’s murderer has brought her back to London from exile in the Caribbean. Masquerading as a male chef, she is working in one of London’s aristocratic households in order to get close to her main suspect. But when the Prince Regent is taken ill after consuming Arianna’s special chocolate dessert, she unexpectedly finds herself at the center of a dangerous scandal.
Because of his expertise in chocolate, the eccentric Earl of Saybrook, a former military intelligence officer, is asked by the top brass at Horse Guards to investigate the suspected poisoning. But during his first interrogation of Arianna, someone tries to assassinate both of them, and it quickly becomes clear that something very sinister is afoot within the highest circles of government. They each have very different reasons for wanting to uncover the truth, yet to have any chance of doing so they must become allies.”
The 2nd and 3rd books are “”The Cocoa Conspiracy” and “Recipe for Treason” and they were all really fun books. A hero with expertise in chocolate? Be still, my heart! Andrea Penrose is better known by the name she uses for her historicals, Cara Elliott.
The Ibarra chocolate disks are awesome. I like abuelita second best. You really bring your chocolate up if you boil the milk and chocolate with a little orange peel. I don’t know what it does but the taste is really rich and you get just a hint of the spices in the disks. Awesome for cold days.
I was in Oaxaca last May and went to a local chocolate shop in the Sunday market in Tlacolula. The shop makes their own traditional Mexican chocolate from scratch and I was able to sample ground cocoa beans for the first–and swear to God only–time. I am an adult so I did not react like Tom Hanks’ BIG character and scrape it off my tongue, but that was a tense few seconds.
And totally makes one marvel at the bravery of the person who thought to TRY AGAIN and mix that inedible stuff with ANYTHING. Thankfully they did because if I had been in charge, the world would be a much sadder place.
Anyway, traditional in Oaxaca means vanilla, cinnamon, almond and sugar, formed into squares and stirred into hot milk, day, night and all times in between. What a great tradition.
I have a lovely china chocolate pot from Austria, circa late 1800’s complete with four little cups. The best – OMG – the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had was at a little cakery near Sterling Castle in Scotland. After touring the castle we went for a walk in the nearby village and it started misting so we ducked into this lovely little lace-curtained shop for scones and hot chocolate. We ended up with cup after cup and scone after scone. It was like stepping into an old book that had come alive.
that looks good
I’m just glad I’m not the only one who hears “Unitasker!” in her head when considering kitchen gadgetry. I still don’t regret my mini whisk.
Yes you ARE a lucky girl. I’d give anything to be living in Boston again.
I have made drinking chocolate with baking cocoa, vanilla sugar and cinnamon; I will have to try it with all the other additions you mention. (Do you think substituting almond extract for the ground almonds would work?) Also, is Abuelita similar to Klass cocoa? I can get both at the international market down the street but got introduced to Klass as a free sample and got addicted quickly, so I never got around to trying Abuelita. Now I need to try them both and see which one is better.