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I made King Louis XV’s favorite hot chocolate recipe -- and you’ll never believe what’s in it!
Louis XV’s favorite hot chocolate recipe contains a surprising secret ingredient….
In honor of my new novel, Wolves and Brioches, I wanted to try to make one of the sweet treats mentioned in the book.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the skills to make an amazing brioche, nor can I cast the spell to conjure one, much to my son’s disappointment.
But hot chocolate was certainly do-able.
An everyday indulgence…for those who could afford it
In Wolves and Brioches, drinking a cup of hot chocolate is a daily ritual for Odette and her mother. This was actually the case for many French nobles and aristocrats of the time. Chocolate wouldn’t become affordable to the average person until the invention of the cacao press by Coenraad Johannes van Houten in the late 1820’s, so in the 1760’s, when Wolves and Brioches takes place, it was truly a luxury treat…and also a bit of an obsession among many of the people who could afford it. Famous 18th century chocolate fans include Madame du Barry, Casanova, Marie-Antoinette, and, as you’re probably expecting from the title of this blog post, King Louis XV.
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In 18th century France, chocolate wasn’t consumed in bar form. Instead, cacao beans were processed and mixed with ingredients like vanilla or even ambergris (a whale waste product that intensifies or nuances flavors). The melted concoction was often set into molds to form flat oval pieces known as pastilles in French. It was also commonly melted into a drink.
As I wrote about drinking chocolate in Wolves and Brioches, I imagined the taste of dark chocolate melted into sugary milk. Just the thing to warm up a winter afternoon. But when I searched for 18th century hot chocolate recipes to re-create the other day, one that came up totally surprised me.
By the 18th century, chocolate wasn’t new in France, but it was still a luxury. Drinking chocolate was formally introduced to France by Anne of Austria, the wife of King Louis XIII. Born and raised in Spain, where chocolate had been imported from the New World since the 1500’s, Anne did not want to leave her beloved beverage behind. It was served at her 1615 wedding to the French king -- the perfect novelty to help make the celebration unforgettable.
I can’t find any exact recipes for this version of hot chocolate, but from what I can gather, drinkable chocolate served in Spain was thick and rich, and seasoned with cane sugar and sometimes spices, including cinnamon. Unfortunately, although I’ve delved through several texts from the time, including An account of divers choice remarks, ... taken in a journey through the Low-Countries, France, Italy, and part of Spain; with the isles of Sicily and Malta. As also, a voyage to the Levant, by Ellis Veryard, which features an elaborate description of cocoa beans being prepared and mixed with nuts and spices, I haven’t been able to figure out if the end result was mixed with water or with milk.
According to this site, as well as some other sources I’ve come across, both water and milk seem to have been used at the time, at least in France. It seems to have been a matter of personal choice and taste. In fact, Radio France’s excellent article on the history of chocolate includes a few quotes from contemporary sources that seem to confirm this. For instance, in his 1671 study of chocolate and other hot beverages, Traités nouveaux et curieux du café, du thé et du 'chocolate', Philippe Sylvestre Dufour states, “Il n'y a pas moins de diversité dans la manière de boire le chocolat que dans la méthode de le préparer…” (There is as much diversity in the ways of drinking chocolate as there are ways to prepare it…).
Louis XV, who ruled France for a huge part of the 18th century (from 1715 to 1774, to be exact), was on team hot water.
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| Louis XV in the 1760's, by Louis-Michel van Loo (image source) |
Louis XV’s hot chocolate recipe
I came upon Louis XV’s favorite hot chocolate recipe by chance. When I’d started looking for a recipe to re-create, I typed “recette chocolat 18e siècle” (“18th century chocolate recipe”), and it was one of the first results that came up, courtesy of no less elegant a source than the Château de Versailles’ official website.
The site quotes a recipe from famous 18th century chef and cookbook writer Menon’s Les Soupers de la Cour ou l’Art de travailler toutes sortes d’aliments pour servir les meilleures tables suivant les quatre saisons. You can read the original French version of the recipe here, or the site’s English translation here.
The recipe essentially calls for melting tablets of chocolate in hot water, and -- no, let’s stop there for a minute.
You might be thinking chocolate mixed with water is a weird idea. But the Mayas and Aztecs, the original growers and consumers of chocolate, drank it this way, so Menon and Louis XV were not doing anything new.
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| Aztec depiction of a man holding a cocoa pod, ca. 15th-16th century AD. (image source) |
On the other hand, while the Mayas and the Aztecs mixed spices and sometimes other ingredients (including honey -- yum!) into the chocolate melted in water, Louis XV’s favorite recipe only calls for one other ingredient: an egg yolk.
Like chocolate and water, though, it turns out this wasn’t something Louis XV or Menon invented, either. I’ve found sources going back to at least the late 17th century that mention it, including one that made me laugh. More on that a little later.
But one thing I haven’t been able to find out is why add an egg to hot chocolate?
In the first centuries that chocolate was being consumed in France, it was considered a vitalizing aphrodisiac. French history scholars like Marie Petitot like to share this tasty tidbit: Being invited to someone’s room for a cup of chocolate actually meant that, while chocolate could be involved, they were expecting a bit more than that. It was basically the equivalent of “Come up to my place for a cup of coffee?” today. So maybe the egg yolk was a way to add some nutrients and energy for what was to follow the chocolate drinking?
I haven’t found anything to confirm or deny this, but another, probably more likely, possibility is that the yolk adds texture and fat, two of the roles that milk provides in most standard recipes today. I’m no expert, so I asked my sister-in-law, who went to culinary school. She agreed that this was probably the reason. She did not agree that this sounded like something worth drinking.
But I was intrigued.
Making Louis XV’s favorite hot chocolate recipe
I could have just taken Louis XV’s favorite hot chocolate recipe as a historical curiosity and opted to make hot chocolate in the indulgent, milk-based way I’d been planning to. That’s certainly how Odette and her mother drink it in Wolves and Brioches. But I was too curious to let Louis XV’s recipe go. I wanted to know if it would be watery and eggy or surprisingly delicious.
This version of hot chocolate was so beloved by Louis XV that he’d make it himself in his private apartments. The fact that a king who was essentially told he was hand-picked by God to rule France and could have anyone do anything he wished, would actually make any kind of edible thing himself made me think it must have been worth the effort. But would three modern-day hot chocolate fans -- my husband, my son, and myself -- agree?
We gathered our ingredients and got started.
One good thing about this recipe is that it’s very easy to make, which might be another reason why Louis XV was okay with preparing it himself.
The recipe says to put as many tablets of chocolate as cups of water, but based on research I’d done, including watching videos like this attempt at a version with modern garnishes and this one featuring a more historically accurate version of a hot chocolate recipe (albeit not Louis XV’s), it seems to mean that one modern-day French standard chocolate bar should work for roughly four cups of hot chocolate.
Like teacups and coffee mugs today, volume and size can vary, but I used a largish teacup to measure out four portions, then added an extra one because the water in the pot looked a bit too shallow. We turned our burner to the highest setting and waited for the water to boil.
Next, we broke up the chocolate bar into squares, which we gently put into the boiling water. This seems to be roughly historically accurate, since as I mentioned previously, chocolate was often portioned out in the form of (oval-shaped) pastilles, which were roughly the same size.
But I did have to do a bit of guesswork in terms of what the pastilles would have tasted like. While it does seem that vanilla and other flavors were sometimes added to chocolate pastilles at the time, as far as I can tell, milk wouldn’t have been. Milk chocolate in hard form wasn’t invented until 1875.
Sugar also may not have been added to a pastille. We have some 18th century images of people drinking chocolate with a sugar pot near to hand, which might prove that the sugar would or could be added at the end.
In this detail from the 1739 painting Le Déjeuner by François Boucher, for example, a woman enjoys a what's probably a cup of chocolate. The sugar pot is near her fingertips.
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| (image source) |
Throughout drinking chocolate’s existence in Europe, some people have also chosen to dip little cookies into it, which would also help with the lack of sugar. We can see an example of this in the 1754 painting Le petit déjeuner de la famille Lavergne, by Jean-Étienne Liotard.
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| (image source) |
So, I decided to go with the darkest chocolate I could find in our supermarket. That ended up being 85% cacao. I figured this was a good compromise; there’s still a bit of sugar, just in case that was what was done at the time.
Once the pieces of chocolate had been added to the boiling water, we quickly lowered the burner to around medium heat, and then stirred and stirred, as much as we could.
It didn’t take long for the chocolate to melt. Once the chocolate and water mixture looked uniform, it was time to add the special ingredient -- the egg yolk!
We stirred that in as best as we could,
and all seemed well. After a minute or two, we figured we had successfully made Louis XV’s favorite hot chocolate.
We poured it into our finest teacups, waited for it to cool a bit, and then cautiously took a sip.
Here are our first impressions:
My husband: “It would be better to leave out the egg yolk because there are little bits of it in the drink. I would also prefer this hot chocolate with milk instead of water, as this recipe is very basic. But of course, at the time, the taste of chocolate was a novelty. I’m okay with adding sugar like you could do at the time, but I’d prefer to add milk and make this something similar to a café latte.”
My 11-year-old son: “This is horrible. It tastes like coffee with some egg bits in it. It probably would taste better with sugar.”
Me: I was surprised at the result. My son said it tasted like coffee, and I sort of agree. We were close to the true essence of cacao with this. And yet, I don’t like coffee, but I did really enjoy chocolate prepared this way. I could absolutely understand becoming addicted to this if I lived in France at the time and it was the easiest way to get my chocolate fix. I would probably add sugar, though. On the other hand, the egg yolk bits were gummy and unpleasant.”
Menon’s recipe mentions that the chocolate will be even better the next day, so we stored the rest of it in a glass jar. The next day, I poured some out into a pan and heated it up, stirring and even whisking in the hopes that maybe the egg yolk would dissolve into the rest of it this time.
All this stirring has been a part of preparing drinkable chocolate since it became popular in Europe. The French even created a special sort of tea or coffee pot equivalent for chocolate, called a chocolatière. One of the things that sets many chocolatières apart is that they have a lid that opens and allows you to insert a long stirring tool called a moussoir (“mousse-maker) that looks like a cross between a wooden spoon and a mace.
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A nécessaire de chocolat (chocolate service) that belonged to Louis XV’s wife, Marie Leszczyńska. Made by Henri Nicolas Cousinet, ca. 1730. Notice the chocolatière with the moussoir, mixing spoon, coming out of a special hole in its lid. Image credit: Musée du Louvre
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| The chocolatière with the small hole in its lid covered and the moussoir and a spoon lying beside it. Image credit: Musée du Louvre |
In the background of the Boucher painting featured earlier in this post, you can also see a simpler and, based on my research, more common version of a chocolatière, with a handle to avoid the hot portion. The lid would be opened and the moussoir or a spoon would be inserted to stir the chocolate.
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I started to wonder if we should have whisked the egg yolk from the start, or if it would have been better if we’d used egg whites, which Menon suggests as an alternative. But as I read the Radio France article about chocolate, I found confirmation that the egg bits might just be part of the experience. In the 1671 book on chocolate that I mentioned before, Dufour wrote: “il s'en trouve d'autres qui mettent du lait chaud à la place de l'eau et y ajoutent un jaune d'œuf, ce à quoi je n'ai jamais pu m'accommoder.” (There are those who add hot milk instead of water and add an egg yolk, something I’ve never been able to stand.)
This quote is another confirmation that people sometimes used milk or sometimes used water when they made hot chocolate, but I’m guessing (from personal experience) that what Dufour couldn’t stand was the gooey egg yolk bits.
That said, as I understand it, Dufour was writing before the widespread use of a moussoir. it’s possible that the head of the moussoir might have caught some of the egg bits -- but I can’t imagine it would have caught them all.
The final verdict
Would I personally drink Louis XV’s hot chocolate again? I actually would -- but without the egg yolk.
Although my family and I could have done without those gooey egg bits, trying this recipe was a fun way to reconnect to a time when chocolate was a rare and precious treat. I could imagine being a noble lady, drinking it in my room at Versailles or in my hôtel particulier in Paris.
It’s not exactly what we’re familiar with today, but Louis XV’s favorite hot chocolate recipe let us savor one of the most amazing flavors in the world in a different way.
However you choose to make it, I hope this blog post inspires you to live like an 18th century French noble for a moment and indulge in a cup (or two) of hot chocolate, yourself!
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In 18th century Paris, a half-magic girl and a fashionable wolf save the city, and maybe the world, in a story of friendship, magic, and mouthwatering pastries.
Wolves and Brioches is currently available in Kindle and paperback formats and is part of the Kindle Unlimited Library. I hope you’ll give it a read!
If you do, I hope you’ll give it a read and share your honest thoughts in a review on Amazon and any other sites or social media platforms where you post. Reviews help books gain more visibility and credibility. Even a review of a short few lines can be incredibly helpful.
I hope you enjoyed discovering Louis XV’s favorite hot chocolate recipe. I'll be back soon with more interesting and strange things to share about life during the Siege of Paris, as well as other moments in Paris’s fascinating past. Feel free to subscribe to this blog or follow me on Goodreads or Amazon to find out when I publish new posts.
Thanks for reading and until next time!
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