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Thank you and Happy Trails!
It’s
almost Halloween and you’d better make sure that you have plenty of candy for
the trick or treaters. But you won’t be
able to find any Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate bars, because they stopped making
them sometime after 1981, because most Americans like sweet chocolate, not dark
chocolate, and didn’t like the taste.
But
I did, I like dark chocolate, and I remember them fondly. So, in the spirit of Halloween and like any
good Hollywood Mad Scientist, I am going to bring it back to life, bwahahaa!
But
where to start on my quest to breathe life back into a dead candy bar? At the beginning of course!
The
first military chocolate that Hershey’s designed was the 1937 D Ration Bar, which
was a 4 ounce, 600 calorie emergency ration bars. It was roundly disliked, because it was too
hard to eat, and because designer Captain Paul P. Logan, wanted it to taste “just
a little better than a boiled potato”. The D Ration Bar was also designed to be able
to withstand 120o F (49o C) heat for an hour without
significant softening. But most importantly,
unlike Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate Bar, you can find a recipe for D Ration Bars!
So,
if we use the D Ration Bar recipe as a framework, or, shall we say, as a
skeleton and add in and take out all the changes that Hershey’s made over the
years, we should get close to that 120o F withstanding, sweet treat
that I first had in 1978, and remember so well even today.
According
to U.S. Army in 1944, the D Ration Bar’s ingredients were chocolate liquor,
powdered sugar, skim milk powder, cocoa butter, oat flour, and vanillin or
ethyl vanilla.
According
to Hershey’s Archives, in 1943, when the Tropical Chocolate Bar was first introduced,
its list of ingredients was identical to that of the D Ration Bar. That is because it was simply a 1 ounce (28
gram) D Bar!
Since the D Bar, was designed to be an emergency
ration, the chocolate “is not a sweet”, and wasn’t a sweet chocolate
with just 15% cacao, but a bittersweet, chocolate made with a 36% cacao.
But in 1957, the basic ingredients were changed, and the oat flour was
out, “nonfat milk solids” replaced the “skim milk
powder”, and “cocoa powder” replaced the “cocoa butter”.
Now nonfat milk solids, are like skim milk powder and cocoa powder is simply
the cocoa solids that remain when all the cocoa butter has been pressed out of
the cocoa paste. Since the oat flour has
been removed, if exchange it for the same amount of powdered sugar, then, our
ingredient list would look like this.
A recipe for a 1 ounce (28 gram) 1957 Tropical Chocolate Bar would then
be as follows:
· 1-1/3
square (10 grams) of Bakers Unsweetened Baking Chocolate
· 4
teaspoons (11 grams) of powdered sugar
· 2
teaspoons (5 grams) of nonfat dry milk powder
· ¾
teaspoons (2 grams) of cocoa powder
· A
dash of ethyl vanilla
To melt the Bakers Unsweetened Baking
Chocolate, use either a microwave or a double-boiler on a stove.
Microwave the chocolate in 30-second
intervals, stirring between each, until the chocolate is mostly melted and only
a few tiny pieces remain, about 1 1/2 minutes in total.
Mix in the remaining ingredients and press
into a mold.
Let cool, remove from the mold and enjoy.
Molds can be purchased at Frontline Rations, HERE,
or at WWIISoldier.com, HERE.
So, now that our Frankenstein recipe is all stitched together, it’s
time to give it a jolt and taste test it to see if it is alive! Bwahahaa!
Come back next week to read “Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate Bar, Part
Deux, The Taste Test!©”
I hope that you enjoy
learning from this resource! To help me
to continue to provide valuable free content, please consider showing your
appreciation by leaving a donation HERE.
Thank you and Happy Trails!
I
hope that you continue to enjoy The Woodsman’s Journal Online and look for me
on YouTube at BandanaMan Productions for other related videos, HERE. Don’t forget to follow me on both The
Woodsman’s Journal Online, HERE,
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That
is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!
Sources
90th
Infantry Division Preservation Group, “Quartermaster Specification - C.Q.D. No.
19 D”, http://www.90thidpg.us/Paperwork/Research/D%20Ration/CQD19D-19420708-Drat.pdf,
accessed October 20, 2024
Harry;
“K-Ration: D-Bar, Sweet Chocolate and the Candy Bar”, https://www.kration.info/d-bar-sweet-chocolateand.html,
accessed October 20, 2024
Hershey’s Community Archives; “Ration
D Bars”, September 7, 2018, https://hersheyarchives.org/encyclopedia/ration-d-bars/#:~:text=The%20first%20of%20the%20Field,Byrd's%20last%20expedition%20in%201939,
accessed October 20, 2024
Hershey’s
Community Archives; “Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate Bar”, September
6, 2018, https://hersheyarchives.org/encyclopedia/hersheys-tropical-chocolate-bar/,
accessed October 20, 2024
Thatcher, Harold Wesley; The Development of Special Rations for the Army, 1944, pages 4 to 15, https://books.google.com/books?id=l4yMl2-ktH4C&pg=PA13&dq=%22the+formula+for+the+d+ration+as+produced%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj28oeH9KWJAxVNkIkEHW5aGVQQ6AF6BAgFEAI#v=onepage&q=%22the%20formula%20for%20the%20d%20ration%20as%20produced%22&f=false,
accessed October 20, 2024
Wikimedia,
“D ration chocolate bar” U.S. Army Center Of Military History, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:D_ration_chocolate_bar.jpg,
accessed October 20, 2024
Wikimedia, “Maniac1 copy” 1934 film Maniac, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maniac1_copy.jpg, accessed October 20, 2024
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