Hot Cocoa To Serve Fifteen: or, Winter has finally arrived

Winter is coming in! The grocery stores are stripped, people are panicking, and everyone in Texas is worried that the power will go out again. All the bars and restaurants are extraordinarily crowded, which suggests to me that everyone wants to get some human contact in before the roads are iced over.

Hot Cocoa for Thirty 1¾ cups boiling water ¾ cup cocoa powder 1¾ cups boiling water (again) 2½ cups sugar 1 tbsp vanilla extract To make the syrup: You're really going to need a double boiler (or a mixing bowl set over a saucepan) for this one-- you can't just cook it directly on a stove burner no matter how low you set the dial. Place the first portion of boiling water in the top of a double boiler (or a heatproof mixing bowl). Sprinkle the cocoa powder on it, and whisk thoroughly. Add the second portion of boiling water and beat well. Cook over simmering water for one hour. Whisk it occasionally, scraping any hard cocoa deposits that form on the sides of the bowl. Don't worry if it looks burnt on the edges; the cocoa is merely dried and will be just fine after mixing it back in. Mix in the sugar and cook for another thirty minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat, allow to cool, and add the vanilla. If desired, pour it through cheesecloth to strain out the last little lumps of cocoa. To serve: Add two tablespoons of syrup to ¾ cup hot milk. (You can just microwave the milk in the mug.) Add more syrup if desired. To serve thirty: Scald six quarts of milk, beat in the syrup, and serve at once. Unknown book or pamphlet clipping, probably 1930s-1950s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

The last big freeze was awful, but this one stands to be worse. Texas' power grid (or what passes for a power grid, anyway) now has a lot of AI datacenters weighing it down. Closer to home, I was a little amused to see that absolutely no flour remained in the baking aisle. It's very optimistic to think we'll all be able to bake our way through the frost on Texas power.

With all that said, we're making hot chocolate in case we get to have a blackout-free freeze.

This comes from my great-grandmother's recipe binder. Clippings like this make me wonder about her. Did she often take charge of the kitchen in the church basement? Or did she have company over a lot more often than I would have expected? (For those who don't recall, I've been informed that she was "a cranky old woman who didn't like children" which doesn't indicate someone who would voluntarily become famous for her hospitality.)

I was going to make the full amount until I measured out the sugar and thought of the grocery budget. This recipe calls for two cereal bowls of it. (Well, it is meant to serve thirty.) Since I didn't want to use half a bag of sugar in one night, I decided to make cocoa for fifteen.

To repeat, the full recipe uses two of these.

The recipe tells us to put our cocoa powder into the water and "let stand undisturbed until moistened." I guess that's to prevent kicking up a cloud of cocoa dust when stirring. I was going to obediently let this sit undisturbed, but that mound of powder would have taken all night to finally get wet. I nudged it with a spoon and let it remain undisturbed for a minute after that.

After a bit of short mixing, the recipe basically tells us to leave this on the stove for an hour. (I assume this is meant to really draw out the flavor from the cocoa powder.) So this is perfect for setting on the back burner while you're cooking other things.

I absolutely refused to babysit this for an hour. Instead, I left the kitchen and only came back and stir it occasionally. The bowl developed dark rings of half-dried cocoa powder in my absence. I know it looks burned on the edges, but keep in mind this is a double boiler. The cocoa didn't get hot enough to burn, it merely dried out.

At the end of the time, our cocoa was almost but not quite syrupy. Assuming the recipe was going right, it next needed a small mountain of sugar.

When I tried a bit on a test spoon, I was amazed at how chocolatey this was. And we weren't done steeping the cocoa over simmering water.

This got surprisingly thick during its last thirty minutes on the stove. You can really tell when looking at the drippings from the whisk I periodically stirred it with.

I didn't see the point of pouring this through cheesecloth (nor do I have any). But after just a few seconds, a dark sediment settled to the bottom of our cocoa. I suppose if you really can't stand that, you can strain this through cloth. I decided to skip the extra fretting.

And of course, what better way to serve our hot cocoa than with gingersnaps!

I tasted this and thought "This is very weak." It's like when you've reached the end of a bottle of chocolate syrup and try to force one more glass of chocolate milk out of it. So I added enough syrup to make our drink properly chocolatey. Then I was absolutely delighted. This was so rich that I didn't even mind the mean serving size. One small cup is perfect.

Incidentally, I also tried serving this cold, thinking "Well, we basically made chocolate syrup." But it just didn't taste very good. This is meant to be hot cocoa. We know that foods often taste bad when you serve them at the wrong temperature. (Just look at how bad our eggnog was after freezing it.) So I'm not debunking the recipe, just noting that (as is often the case) you should serve it at the temperature the recipe says.

In closing, here are some handy preparation tips from someone who mostly survived the Great Texas Winter Blackout. I'm not bothering with any advice that involves shopping. Panic buyers have probably already stripped the grocery stores.

• First, wash things while you've still got electricity to run the machines:
• Do your laundry. All of it. Wash your bedsheets because if everything else is going wrong, a fresh clean bed feels so, so good. Wash all your rags so you have a clean stash ready to wipe any messes that arise before electricity returns. And of course, don't forget to clean your clothes!
• Clean your dishes, especially if you use a dishwasher instead of doing them by hand. You don't want your last pre-blackout dishes to slowly ferment while you wait. Even if you don't mind doing dishes in the dark, sometimes the sink won't drain right until things melt.
• Wash yourself! Take a good, long shower. If the water goes out, you want to start the next few days feeling fresh and clean.
• Find the biggest bucket or pot in the house and fill it with tap water. We lost our tap water because our local water plant does not have emergency generators. Don't let it happen to you unawares.
• If your kitchen sink is on an outside wall, open the cabinets under it so that warm air can drift past the pipes. Also, leave the faucet on a slow drip, even if the sound gets annoying.
• Charge all your internet-y things.
• If you have candles or oil lamps or suchlike, get them out and put them where you'll want them. And don't forget to dig out the matches or lighters! Put them right next to the candles so that you don't need to rummage for them in a cold dark house.

Well, good luck everyone! I'd love to chirp that following these easy steps will make blackouts a breeze, but I didn't believe that long enough to type out that sentence. But at least things won't be so bad. And who knows, maybe we'll all be fine and simply put all our candles away until next time.