My mother’s pantry disgorged a can of Hershey’s Cocoa dating back to the mid-90s (if I’m interpreting the 94P date code correctly). Their Favorite Hot Cocoa recipe is straightforward:
SINGLE SERVING: Combine 1 heaping teaspoon HERSHEY’S Cocoa, 2 heaping teaspoons sugar, and dash salt in mug, add 2 teaspoons milk and stir until smooth. Heat 1 cup milk: fill mug. Stir and serve.
Browsing in the grocery store revealed that the current recipe has considerably more stiffness: two tablespoons of both cocoa and sugar.
One tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. How they interpret “heaping” I don’t know, but it’s under a factor of two. Maybe cups are bigger these days, but surely not by a factor of four or five.
Zowie!
The Official Recipe from the Hershey’s website lists 2-3 teaspoons of cocoa and 2 tablespoons of sugar. I love this suggestion:
VARIATIONS
Rich and Adult: Increase cocoa to 2 tablespoons …
Adult cocoa. Who’d’a thunk it?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
6 responses to “Recipe Inflation: Hershey’s Cocoa”
Adult cocoa is made with peppermint Schnapps. Great on a cold winter day.
I knew there was something missing…
Time to go shovel the driveway. I can feel a chill comin’ on strong…
I’ve a friend who did an art project where she found vintage pictures of people eating, and did proportional measurements of plate size. From this she made a graph of plate size from about 1880 to now, which as I recall stayed fairly constant until the 1960’s, and then began to grow slowly to approximately 1.5 times where it started. She had to estimate *food* on the plate, but I suppose we could assume twice the area, and depending on how you stack your food, more than twice the volume of food. (Although in discussing that, we considered the possibility that maybe people are serving flatter food to give the appearance of more food.)
depending on how you stack your food
The angle of repose puts an upper limit on that… but clever stacking can produce a remarkable pile o’ brownies!
We generally serve chow on the “medium” plates from that old Corelle set: 8.5 rather than 10 inches. Makes a given portion look bigger, which is a net Good Thing for us. On those rare occasions when we go out for a meal, the plates always seem awkwardly large and we always bring back enough for another meal or two.
I’d love to see that plate size graph…
Or a pie chart.
Hahah hahaaaa.
*idly fingers plonk button*
That was baaad…
But, now that you mention it, I foresee a line of pie-chart dinnerware, with proper nutrient proportions laid out in gleaming reproof.
Or something along the lines of those tool outlines on workshop pegboards, done up in ceramic.
There’s a reason I’m not in marketing…