Chocolate by Sarah Moss (ebook voice reader .TXT) 📕

Rose petals or oils were used in place of the Amazonian ‘ear flowers’ and musk might be added, perhaps both to accentuate the luxury status of chocolate and to mimic the aromatic qualitiesof the Mesoamerican preparation. Sometimes, perhaps in memory of the maize thickeners used in chocolate on ordinary occasions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mesoamerica, the Spanish added almonds or eggs and milk to their chocolate drinks, which were usually but not always taken hot. There are directions for processing cocoa beans from raw in a domestic kitchen dating from the end of the seventeenth century, but most cacao probably arrived in its most stable form, as solidified cakes requiring only to be dissolved for drinking.

Chocolate remained characteristically Spanish until the end of the seventeenth century, although English and Italian friars had encountered it in New Spain a hundred years earlier. Chocolate was served to both inquisitors and victims of the Inquisition, including at public scenes of torture and execution, and was regarded by visitors as a speciality of the Spanish court. An Italian medical treatise of the mid-1600s makes reference to cocoa, but the first reliable evidence of chocolate being prepared and drunk outside Spain is from the court of Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany, where toasted cocoa beans were crushed and infused with jasmine flowers before being ground with sugar, vanilla and ambergris, which is a floral-smelling intestinal accretion of the sperm whale. At around the same date, the court of Louis XIII of France was served by two Italian cooks, who brought with them coffee, chocolate and tea. It was Louis XIV’s marriage to the Spanish Infanta Maria Theresa in the 1660s that brought a retinue of habitual chocolate drinkers to the court of the Sun King, from where Madame de Sévigné famously wrote to her daughter, marooned in the provinces, about the newly fashionable beverage.

England in the second half of the seventeenth century might have been expected to afford less of a welcome toan expensive novelty from the courts of Catholic Europe. In 1642 the reign of Charles I collapsed into a civil war in which Charles was routinely identified with loose-living Continental Absolutist monarchs, in contrast to the Protestant clean living that his opponent Oliver Cromwell claimed to exemplify. The dominant, although contested, Puritan ethos regarded luxury, indulgence and sensuality as sinful, and rejected several foodstuffs on this principle. (It was Cromwell who is popularly said to have outlawed Christmas pudding as an inappropriate way of marking Jesus’ assumption of mortality.) At the same time, war – as ever – required increased ingenuity in the kitchen and also increased mobility among soldiers and those fleeing the country or their enemies, accelerating exposure to and use of new ingredients. The cookbooks which began to appear in the 165os, after the end of the civil war, in fact display a thirst for new, foreign flavours and recipes. Edward Phillips’s 1658 The New World of English Words, or, A General Dictionary Containing the Interpretations of such Hard Words as are Derived from Other Languages, defines chocolate as ‘a compounded Indian drink, whose chief ingredient is a fruit called Cocao’. It seems that the first chocolate houses, semi-public spaces more seemly than ale houses but more sociable than drinking at home, were established in London in the late 1650s. A flyer for M. Sury’s chocolate house ‘neare East gate’, published in Oxford in 1660, only ten years after the opening of the first English coffee house in the same city, is misleadingly titled ‘The vertues of the chocolate East-India drink’. This pamphlet promises prospective customers that ‘By this pleasing drink health is preserved, sicknesse diverted, It cures Consumptions and Cough of the Lungs; it expels poison, cleanseth the teeth, and sweetneth the Breath; provoketh Urine; cureth the stoneand strangury, maketh Fatt and Corpulent, faire and aimeable, it cureth the running of the Reins, with sundry other desperate Diseases.’ The writer bursts into verse to explain the benefits to women:

The gaming room at White’s chocolate house, from Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, 1735.

Nor need the Women longer grieve,

Who spend their oyle yet not Conceive,

For ‘tis a Help Immediate,

If such but Lick of Chocolate.

The Nut-Browne Lasses of the Land,

Whom Nature vail’d in Face and hand,

Are quickly Beauties of High-Rate,

By one small Draught of Chocolate.

Many expensive and/or exotic substances were said to cure female infertility and promote beauty; one should probably not read too much into the attribution of these particular qualities to chocolate, but it is interesting that the stuff is advertised for its effects rather than its taste. Chocolate, like coffee in these decades, was still more part of the materia medica than an ingredient for domestic cooks. This is not to say that it was always taken, like modern prescribed drugs, to redress a particular problem, but was rather consumed to promote particular kinds of well-being, like drinking camomile tea before bed or espresso before work.

Despite the rhyme on the Oxford flyer, chocolate was still consumed in seventeenth-century England mostly by men in the largely homosocial environment of chocolate houses. It used to be said that coffee-house culture was exclusively masculine, but although certainly the great majority of customers were men it is now clear that women owned and worked in the famous London coffee houses from their beginnings in the late seventeenth century until they were reincarnated as private clubs in the nineteenth century. There is no reason to believe that the shorter-lived chocolate houses were any different. The references to chocolate in Samuel Pepys’s diary place it squarely in this context; the first mention is in January 1660, when someone leaves ‘a Quantity of Chocolate’ at his house as a gift, but thereafter chocolate is an unquestioned part of the world of the upwardly mobile politician and intellectual that Pepys exemplifies. On 24 April 1661 Pepys wakes, ‘with my head in a sad taking through the last night’s drink, which I am very sorry for; so rose and went out with Mr Creed