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

to drink our morning draft, which he did give me in chocolate.’ On 17 October 1662 Pepys, who made a great career in naval administration, discussed his successes with Lord Sandwich and then went

Martin Engelbrecht, The Chocolate Drink, c. 1740.

with Mr Creed to Westminster Hall, and by and by thither comes Captn. Ferrers, upon my sending for him, and we three to Creed’s chamber, and there sat a good while and drank chocolate. Here I am told how things go at Court; that the young men get uppermost, and the old serious lords are out of favour; that Sir H. Bennet, being brought into Sir Edward Nicholas’s place, Sir Charles Berkeley is made Privy Purse; a most vicious person, and one whom Mr Pierce, the surgeon, today (at which I laugh to myself), did tell me that he offered his wife £300 per annum to be his mistress.3

Chocolate is what professional men with powerful positions at court and in government drank while exchanging news. In this light, chocolate’s role in late seventeenth-century England seems more like its role in pre-Conquest Tenochtitlan than either early modern Mesoamerica or Louis XIV’s Versailles.

Early in the eighteenth century, recipes using chocolate as an ingredient began to appear in English cookbooks. At first there are instructions for making the drink served in chocolate houses at home, which give a sense of how much conventions had changed since the Spanish began to replicate Moctezuma’s ceremonial drink at home. The Accomplis’d Female Instructor, published in London in 1704, gives this recipe:

To make Chocolate the best way.

Take an equal Proportion of Water and Milk, let them well incorporate in Boyling, but continually stir them, lest they burn to the Bottom; so having grated or beaten your Chocolate Cakes fine, put to a Quart of the Liquor an Ounce and a half or two Ounces, if you would have it rich, then take it off the Fire, and put to it twoYolks of new lay’d Eggs well beaten up with as much fine Sugar dissolved in Rose-water, as will sweeten it; then mill it with a Milling-stick, till it becomes thick, and so pour it into dishes.

This drink – or perhaps, given the egg yolks, custard – is well on the way to modern ‘hot chocolate’. The spices are gone, replaced by rose water, which may represent the ghost of the Maya ‘ear flowers’ but is a standard ingredient of English sweet dishes from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Milk has joined water as the base of the drink, perhaps because of the egg thickener. But sugar is still added to taste and the Spanish molinillo survives in the ‘Milling-stick’. The cakes, of course, are not chocolate cake as we would now recognize it, but cacao in its solid, processed form. It is easy to see how, within a decade or two of entering the domestic kitchen, this hybrid became a dessert. Similar ingredients are combined in two different ways in early eighteenth-century English cookery. Recipes for ‘Chocolate Cream’ dissolve chocolate in a little boiling water and then add a pint of cream and two eggs per quarter pound of chocolate, beat it until it boils, allow it to cool, and then beat it again ‘that it may go up with a Froth’. This is in the old English tradition of creams and syllabubs. The alternative is a kind of macaroon. The second edition of Mary Kettilby’s Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physic and Surgery; For the use of All Good Wives, Tender Mothers, and Careful Nurses, published in London in 1719, includes ‘Lemon or Chocolate-Puffs’:

Take half a pound of Double-refin’d Sugar, finely beat and sifted, grate into it the yellow rind of a very fair large Lemon; then whip up the White of an Egg to a froth, andwet it with this froth, ’till ’tis as stiff as a good working Paste, lay it on Papers and bake it in a very slow Oven; lay some round and some long: If you make Chocolate, grate about an ounce as you did the Peel.

Chocolate had begun to be used in Italian cookery two or three decades earlier. Elizabeth David, in Harvest of the Cold Months: A Social History of Ice and Ices (1994), describes a household management book by Antonio Latini published in Naples in the early 1690s, which gives a recipe for – or perhaps account of – a chocolate sorbet. Equal weights of unsweetened chocolate and sugar were beaten with approximately three times their combined weight in water and ‘worked or stirred, it would seem from Latini’s hazy instructions, during the whole of the freezing process. The mousse was to be served as soon as it was frozen.’ Like the chocolate creams and ‘puffs’, this sorbet would have been served as part of the dessert course, meant for spectacle more than nourishment, which appeared as the grand finale of the most formal meals and banquets in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The presence of these dishes in cookbooks signals that they were available at least as objects of aspiration to those of the gentry who, unable to afford fully trained professional cooks who would not have needed written recipes, were nevertheless willing to invest in expanding their own tastes (at least in theory, since it is by no means obvious that people who buy cookbooks cook and eat the dishes in them). These are class-specific, and they are also, of course, distinctively European creations which would have been unrecognizable in Mesoamerica.

Drinking chocolate became an established part of the eighteenth-century breakfast in France and England, but recipes for chocolate cakes, tarts, mousses and creams alsoproliferated. When the English dined at midday, as most did until the late seventeenth century, breakfast seems to have been an informal snack of whatever leftovers were around. Dinner, especially for the aristocracy, became steadily later through the eighteenth century, eventually displacing ‘supper’ (previously taken before retiring to bed) and creating a vacancy for what became