Chocolate Wine from 1723

I love wine. I also love chocolate and so sometimes I'll put those two things together. Sip a wine, bite a chocolate. Sip a wine, bite of chocolate. But in the 18th century they decided let's just make it one thing and they mashed them into a single recipe called wine chocolate or chocolate wine. So thank you to my Patreon patrons for supporting this channel for yet another year as I make chocolate wine, this time on Drinking History. Today's recipe comes from John Knott's 1723 cookbook The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary or The Accomplished Housewife's Companion and it says to make wine chocolate take a pint of sherry or a pint and a half of red port, four ounces and a half of chocolate, six ounces of fine sugar, and half an ounce of white starch or fine flour. Mix, dissolve, and boil all these as before but if your chocolate be with sugar take double the quantity of chocolate and half the quantity of sugar, and so in all. A rather simple recipe, just four ingredients. A heaping three-quarter cup or 170 grams of sugar, two tablespoons or 14 grams of flour, 4.5 ounces or 130 grams of unsweetened chocolate which should be either grated or chopped very fine, then one 750 milliliter bottle of ruby port or two cups of sherry. I opted for port because I just love the stuff. Also do you ever wonder why port which is from Portugal almost always has a British name like Sandeman or Taylor Fladgate, Grahams, Wires, and Churchill? Well when I was in the city of Porto in Portugal back in October I asked why that was and it turns out that in the 17th century Portugal would often ship wine up to Britain but they didn't bottle it quite as well as we do today and so it would very often go bad by the time that it got up there, and so one of the more popular wines that went up there was a fortified wine called port. During the fermentation process they would add a spirit, usually something called brandy though it's not the same as normal brandy, but they would add this and it would stop the fermentation process leaving a lot more sugar in the wine, and it would also make it more alcoholic but it would also make it last longer, and so that is the wine that became popular in England and the people who were importing it it became so popular that they just set up entire warehouses down in Portugal itself and they were all from Britain so most of the warehouses ended up being owned by British people. Anyway I just thought that was interesting because I've always kind of wondered why is port named after a bunch of old English guys. Anyway I love port and so let's get to making this. So start by pouring the port or sherry if you prefer into a medium saucepan, and then whisk in the sugar a little at a time until it is well dissolved. Then sift in the flour and whisk that in as well, and then add the chocolate. Now even grated fine it is not going to really dissolve per se but that's why we're going to heat it up. The recipe says to boil it as before, as before being a reference to an earlier recipe in the book, and so that is to boil it or rather simmer it for 10 to 12 minutes. So set it over a medium heat and slowly bring it to a gentle boil all the while stirring so the chocolate doesn't burn to the bottom, and once it starts to boil keep stirring for about 10 minutes, and you just want a very low boil just enough so that you're seeing bubbles come up not a rolling boil like you were making pasta. Chocolate is after all a delicate thing. Now after about 10 minutes it should have thickened up quite nicely, and you can take it off the heat and let it cool for a bit but while it cools it will thicken some more so you want to keep it stirring otherwise it will form a skin on top and that's not very appetizing. Now I was inspired to actually make this recipe after having a conversation with Christian de Vries who was a finalist on series 15 of the Great British Bake Off, one of my favorite shows. He was saying how he had tried chocolate wine at some point, and he wanted to make a tart based off of that recipe, and asked if I would make the actual recipe before he ended up doing the tart. So that's what I'm doing and I'll put a link in the description to where you can watch him make that tart and get that recipe, and surely it will be a tart fit for a king as when this recipe was actually written it was a drink fit for the king. Back in 2013 there was a hidden room discovered at Hampton Court Palace, a room entirely dedicated to the production of chocolate. Now the palace was originally built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in 1514, and the palace eventually became the home of King Henry VIII. Essentially Cardinal Wolsey had kind of fallen from favor after being unable to get the Pope's blessing for Henry to get a and since Henry had a habit of cutting people's heads off, Wolsey thought hey how about to smooth things over I give you this palace. The thing is it didn't really work because he still ended up getting charged with treason or accused of treason, and on his way to London to actually be formally charged he ended up dying of natural causes. Anyway Hampton Court ended up becoming one of the main residences for the kings and queens of England through the mid-18th century, but around the year 1689 the place was in dire need of an update. See over in France King Louis XIV had just moved in to the Great Palace of Versailles, while in England they still had this palace which really hadn't been updated in about 150 years. So when William III and Mary II took the throne they hired the eminent architect Sir Christopher Wren to give the place a much-needed facelift. This facelift was pretty comprehensive and it included a lot of updates to the kitchens and the addition of an entirely new kitchen, the chocolate kitchen. Now chocolate was actually still pretty new in England at this period and it only begun appearing in cookbooks a few years earlier, and it was extremely expensive because not only did it have to come all the way from the Americas but the other ingredients in it like sugar and spices had to come from Asia or the Americas as well. So typically it was only available to the elite like the royal family and other rich people. In addition it was extremely time consuming to actually prepare the chocolate to be consumed as a drink and so between the really expensive ingredients and the laborious process Christopher Wren decided it would get its own kitchen and it would be right at the back stairs of the king's own private apartments. Turns out King William III was a big fan of chocolate but nothing compared to a slightly later king George I. George came from Hanover, Germany and by the time he arrived in England chocolate was all the rage. The city of London was teeming with chocolate houses and so wanting to either fit in or maybe just because he loved the stuff he demanded a fresh cup of chocolate be delivered to his room every morning for breakfast. To make this possible he decided that he would hire his own private chocolatier, the top chocolatier in the city Thomas Tosier. It was either in 1714 when he took the throne or 1717. I've seen both dates but either way it was very early on. Now you might think that Tosier would be part of the kitchen staff but he was not. His post was so important that he was actually part of the personal staff to the king which means that he personally took the chocolate up every morning to the king's bedchamber and he was one of the very few people who actually got to go in and see the king lying in bed every morning. He was actually so important that he even had the honor of getting his own room at the palace that he basically called home. So he was at the palace pretty much full time which was a bit of an issue because he already had the business that was up and running and quite popular in Greenwich in an area that would eventually become known as Chocolate Row and so he needed somebody to run that place full time. Luckily his wife was pretty much just as good a chocolate maker as he was. Her name was Grace Tosier and besides being an excellent chocolate maker she was an excellent marketer. Her husband was now chocolate maker to the king and she was going to capitalize on that. She began marketing the chocolate house as a royal experience and she would actually hold events at the chocolate house that mirrored events that were going on at court like when it was the king's birthday she would have a small gathering that was like of the same ilk as a much, much more expensive gathering taking place at court itself. In 1721 she even went so far as to build a great room where they could hold small dances. Basically if you didn't get invited to the grand ball at the palace you could go to this chocolate house and kind of have a little bit of the same royal experience light. She became quite the mover and shaker in London and was described as wearing a full brimmed hat with flowers in her bosom and that is how the eminent painter Bartholomew Dandridge depicted her when he included her in a series of the most important people of the city. In 1733 Thomas Tosier died but Grace Tosier who did remarry kept the last name because it had kind of become a brand and now her chocolate house wasn't anymore his. Her chocolate house had become extremely popular not only with the people who couldn't get into court but the people who could actually get into court. In 1741 the Lord Mayor of London dined there and in 1742 their royal highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales attended by a great many lords and ladies and persons of distinction went immediately to Grace Tosier's on Blackheath where they had a very elegant dinner, a fine band of music playing all the time. Now eventually the chocolate houses of London faded away and disappeared as did the chocolate kitchen at Hampton Court and it remained hidden until 2013 when they found it and now you can actually go visit it again in all of its chocolate glory, and unfortunately there are no menus from Tosier's that still exist nor any descriptions of exactly what recipes Thomas Tosier was making for the king but it was very likely the same types of drinks that you find in cookbooks from this period where the chocolate is made as a drink, mixed with either water or milk or very often wine like the chocolate wine I'm about to drink, and here we are chocolate wine from 1723. So it smells really good. It smells like super chocolatey in here. I think I put it into a wine glass because I thought chocolate wine but I think that this would probably do better in a mug especially because it should still be served somewhat warm at least like a little above room temperature otherwise it gets too thick I think. Even now it's warm and it's still pretty thick but let's give it a try. It is thick but oh oh that's that's good. So at first you get the chocolate, that's what you smell, that's what you taste, but then there is that port which is sweetened in of itself but it has I mean it is still wine and so it has that little bit of burn from the alcohol Really thick. You don't need very much. I think that you know probably the amount that I'm making could probably be a dozen servings but really, really good and different but I think anyone who likes chocolate and likes wine would really enjoy this and it's not that hard to make. What I do think is that it would benefit from maybe a little bit of spice and the thing is at this period when they made chocolate they would often grind it down and then let it solidify into a cake and I've done that here on the channel before and very often that cake of chocolate was already flavored so it could already have sugar in it but it could also have anise, and cinnamon, and cardamom, and sometimes hot chili peppers. Wasn't super popular in England but sometimes or vanilla or other things to flavor it so you could add a little bit of those things into this. You don't want a lot because the wine should be kind of dominant but it would just make it a little bit more complex. Also can I just tell you that the entire time I was researching this video on chocolate wine what was in my head was chocolate wine like the chocolate rain song that was big on YouTube like in 2008 like early, early YouTube. Does anybody remember that? Chocolate rain. That's what I kept thinking of when I was making this. I'm dating myself I'm sure. Just a reminder that Christian de Vries from the Great British Bake Off has made this chocolate wine into a tart so I will put a link in the description to where you can watch and make it, and where you can get the recipe to do it yourself. So make some chocolate wine, make a chocolate wine tart, just have some chocolate if you want because there's always room for chocolate, and there's always room for port, and I will see you next time on Drinking History.