I first read about drinking chocolate in a Pippi Longstocking story. “Punch or chocolate?” a grownup offered Pippi at a party. Pippi, quite sensibly, opted to have both. I wanted just one. I wanted a drink of chocolate.

Cocoa and hot chocolate are very nice things. We think of them as cozy, childish drinks; but drinking chocolate used to rate with coffee or tea as a fine adult way to start the day.

Jane Austen and Charles Dickens both used the drinking of chocolate in the morning to symbolize unbearable snobbery.

In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland is thankful, after reading an upsetting letter from her brother, that the unkind General Tilney, who is the kind of man who admires only the new and the fashionable is too occupied by “his cocoa and his newspaper” to notice her tears.

In A Tale of Two Cities, the loathsome Monseigneur requires no less than four uniformed men to prepare his morning’s chocolate. It would have been an unendurable trial for him to consume chocolate prepared by only three men, and “he must have died of two.”

These days, we don’t need even one uniformed lackey to get a cup of cocoa. We don’t even need a stove. There are a great many instant cocoas and hot chocolates available.

In general, instant cocoa is prepared by adding hot water; instant hot chocolate requires hot milk. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, so check the package instructions.

Most instant powders produce a sickly or over-sweet drink. The only first-rate instant hot chocolate is Godiva’s. Serve this when you want to borrow money from your guests.

You can also make a fine cup of cocoa from scratch, using unsweetened cocoa. Hershey’s cocoa is good, as is the recipe on the box.

But none of these are Drinking Chocolate.

Drinking Chocolate is thick, slow, and luscious, and it must be made from solid chocolate.

Years after Pippi’s adventures set me dreaming of a cup of chocolate, I stumbled across a recipe for that drink in an old, old cookbook. Along with other beverages, this included one called simply “Chocolate.” Translating ingredients and cooking methods, I came up with this:

Break a one-ounce square of unsweetened chocolate in half. Put half of it away; break up the other half with a butter knife and put the fragments into a small, heavy-bottomed pot (or the top of a double boiler, if you’re nervous). Add two tablespoons hot water; cook and stir constantly over medium heat until the mixture is smooth.

Stir in a generous tablespoon of sugar; continue cooking until this is completely dissolved. Lower the heat, then slowly add one measuring cup of hot milk, stirring constantly. When this is smooth, add a quarter to a half teaspoon of real vanilla. Let this cook about five minutes over the lowest possible heat, stirring frequently.

I brewed a cup of this and shared it with my son. “What do you think?” I asked.

“It’s like drinking a bar of chocolate,” he said. And he was right.