Choca, Half Coffee and Half Chocolate from 1866
Reader ratingsFresh coffee poured through the grounds and chocolate melted into hot milk, mixed half and half in the cup: the choca of Pierre Blot’s 1866 New York cookery lectures.
- Recipe makes
- About 4 cups, 4 servings
- Prep
- Total
Make the coffee while the chocolate melts; both are ready in about 10 minutes.
Choca in a white china cup, with a coffee pot, a jug of hot chocolate and a piece of chocolate.
The story behind the recipe
Choca is coffee and hot chocolate in one cup, half and half. Pierre Blot, a French cook who gave public cookery lectures in New York, printed it in 1866 in a single line: “This is half coffee and half chocolate, with milk, and is said to have been devised by Voltaire.” Blot’s own hedge, “is said to,” is as far as the Voltaire story goes; we found nothing earlier that backs it.
Two recipes in one cup
Blot gives no method for choca, but the coffee and the chocolate sit just above it in the same lecture. His coffee is “five tablespoons” of ground coffee “to a quart of water,” the grounds first wetted with a little boiling water, then the rest poured through, and never boiled: “If you boil coffee it dissipates the aroma.” His chocolate is grated, melted with “a tablespoon of water to four ounces of chocolate,” then thinned with hot milk, “a half pint of milk to an ounce of chocolate.” We make each and mix them equally, which is our reading of “half coffee and half chocolate.”
Coffee and chocolate were mixed elsewhere too. A Pavia dictionary of 1829 defines the local barbajada as “chocolate with cream and coffee,” though Milan and Parma dictionaries of the time made it with milk and chocolate alone, and an 1856 Parma dictionary says the people of Lucca called coffee mixed with chocolate chiaroscuro. Turin’s bicerin, often given an eighteenth-century date, we could not find in print before 1900.
Read more about this recipe
Making it today
Blot doesn’t say whether his chocolate was sweetened, and he adds no sugar. We use unsweetened baking chocolate and leave the sugar to each cup.
The chocolate of two centuries earlier, ground with chile and anise, is in How Were Coffee, Tea and Chocolate Made in 1685?, with Colmenero’s Spiced Chocolate, Frothed with Hot Water. For coffee and milk alone, there is Mrs. Beeton’s Café au Lait with Essence of Coffee.
128.—CHOCOLATE. Grate the chocolate. A tablespoon of water to four ounces of chocolate. Put it on a gentle fire some time. When melted pour on hot milk, and it is ready for use. A half pint of milk to an ounce of chocolate is a good average.
129.—CHOCA. This is half coffee and half chocolate, with milk, and is said to have been devised by Voltaire.
Recipe makes: About 4 cups, 4 servings
Ingredients
For About 4 cups, 4 servings. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for About 4 cups, 4 servings.
- Medium-ground coffee2 1/2 tbsp
- Boiling water, for the coffee2 cups
- Unsweetened chocolate57 g
- Water, for the chocolate1 1/2 tsp
- Milk2 cups
- Sugar, to taste (optional)
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 2 1/2 tbsp medium-ground coffee
- 2 cups boiling water, for the coffee
- 57 g unsweetened chocolate
- 1 1/2 tsp water, for the chocolate
- 2 cups milk
- Sugar, to taste (optional)
Equipment
Coffee dripper and paper filters
Kettle
Grater
Small saucepan
Whisk
Instructions
Grate the unsweetened chocolate into the small saucepan, add the water, for the chocolate and set it over a very low heat until melted, stirring now and then.
Heat the milk until steaming, then pour it onto the chocolate a little at a time, whisking until smooth. Keep it hot without boiling.
Put the medium-ground coffee in the filter. Pour on just enough of the boiling water, for the coffee to wet the grounds and wait a minute.
Pour the rest of the boiling water through. Let the coffee stand a minute or two to settle.
Pour equal amounts of the coffee and the hot chocolate into each cup, and add sugar to taste.
Nutrition
165calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- About 4 cups, 4 servings
- Servings
- 4
Roughly estimated from USDA FoodData Central values for whole milk, unsweetened baking chocolate and brewed coffee, for one 1-cup serving without sugar.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
Blot’s coffee is five tablespoons to a quart of water, and his chocolate an ounce to half a pint of milk; this is half a quart of each.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the batch.
Changes from the source: Blot gives choca no method; mixing his coffee and his chocolate in equal parts is our reading. The amounts are half a quart of each, so 2 1/2 tablespoons of coffee to 2 cups of water and 2 ounces (57 g) of chocolate to 2 cups of milk. Blot brewed in an “Old Dominion” coffee pot with a sieve chamber; a filter cone or drip pot works the same way. Unsweetened chocolate and the optional sugar are ours.
Storage
Best drunk at once. The chocolate milk can be made ahead and reheated gently; make the coffee fresh.
Scaling changes the ingredients only; glassware, ice and timings need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.
Sources and attribution
Pierre Blot, Prof. Blot’s Lectures on Cookery, delivered in Mercantile Hall (New York, 1866), “Varieties”, Nos. 126, 128 and 129, “Coffee”, “Chocolate” and “Choca”, pp. 41–42
Recipe details
- Drink
- Alcohol-free
- Drink family
- Hot Drinks
- Region
- American
- Era
- 19th century
- Source decade
- 1860s
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Occasion
- Dry January
- Season
- Winter