Chocolate Milkshake

With summer coming to a close, I'm trying to enjoy every last bit of ice cream before the weather turns cooler. Remember when we made frozen vanilla cream? I still had plenty leftover, but it was beginning to crystallize with freezer burn, so I wanted to find a creative use for it. Good thing I found this recipe for chocolate milkshakes:

Is that a new cookbook, you ask? Why yes, it is! This recipe comes from Fun with Cooking: Easy Recipes for Beginners, by Mae Blacker Freeman. It was published by Random House in 1947.

As soon as I picked up this cookbook, I knew I had to have it. Check out the Introduction--

It reads: This cook book is for beginners. The recipes are interesting yet not difficult, and each step is carefully explained. The recipes are for things youngsters like to eat, so that the young cook can enjoy the results of her own work. A girl who makes the things in this book, following carefully all instructions, gains enough experience to go on to more complicated dishes. Geraldine Miller is the young cook in the pictures. She is ten years old and lives in Woodlyn, Pennsylvania.

I mean, this book was written for me. I'm hardly a youngster, but there isn't a thing written here that doesn't apply to me. I'm even willing to overlook the inherent gender bias in this Introduction because I am just so desperate for victory in the kitchen! (See what I did there? That's the name of this blog, remember?)

Okay, back to the chocolate milkshakes. As you might have noticed from that first shot, before we can make the milkshake, we must first flip to page 44 and make our hot fudge sauce. Yes, folks, this is a multi-page recipe!

Hot Fudge Sauce
1/2 cup sugar
4 tablespoons cocoa
1 tablespoon cornstarch
Salt
1 cup hot water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1) Put the sugar, cocoa, cornstarch, and a dash of salt into a saucepan and mix well.
2) Stir in the hot water, then add the vanilla.

3) Put the saucepan over a small flame and cook the fudge sauce until it is thick, stirring all the while.
4) This fudge sauce can be poured hot over ice cream to make a hot fudge sundae. Or you can store it in the refrigerator in a covered jar and use it cold for sundaes, milk shakes, or poured over cake.

Bingo! I decided to chill my fudge sauce in a covered jar so that I could use it for milkshakes later. After a couple of hours in the fridge, I flipped back to page 10 for the very complex task of making a milkshake.

Chocolate Milk Shake
1 cup cold milk
1 tablespoon chocolate syrup (page 44)

1) Put everything into a clean jar that has a tight screw cap. Shake well until frothy. (One or two spoonfuls of ice cream added just before you do the shaking makes the milk shake taste especially good.)

You guys, the recipe seriously says this. It's a book for beginners, after all. And I'm not saying it wasn't helpful.

2) Pour into a glass and serve.

Doesn't that look delicious? People, I'm here to tell you it was. I added the whipped cream and chocolate chips, and that made it even more delicious. (And more photogenic for the blog.)

While I was drinking this delicious concoction, I started reading more "About Milk" from my cookbook for beginners. The book depicts an old milk bottle alongside the description, which I remembered seeing at a local antique mall a few weeks ago:

About Milk
Milk is one of our most valuable foods. It contains many important minerals and vitamins. Every child should drink a quart of milk a day. Milk is made up of millions of very small drops of butter-fat floating in water. They are so tiny that all you can see is an evenly white liquid. When a bottle of milk stands for a while, the larger droplets rise and flow together. This is the cream which you see in the upper part of the bottle. 

The top part is cream. The bottom part is skim milk. All mixed together it is whole milk.

Oh. Cool. I think I'll stick with my homogenized chocolate milkshakes, thanks.