Cacaosophy

Seventeenth-century treatises on cacao such as those featured here were published as medical literature or botanicals, and are now catalogued among the rare books of pharmaceutical libraries. Chocolate was consistently sold as a drug for more than two centuries of its European circulation, though it could be had early on in taverns and was eventually part of the barista's arsenal and the café menu. If it had multiple identities that is partially because through chocolate's so

The ironies abound when Candide and his new traveling companion, Martin, a downtrodden scholar, arrive in Venice. Their destination is the home of Count Pococurante, a wealthy Venetian senator with a riverside home known for its beauty. More importantly for this scene, he has the reputation of being “a man who has never known what worry is” (117). Here the travelers find abundant delights that recall El Dorado among his possessions, but find none of that land’s optimism in th

While treatises constitute an important and authoritative source for ideas about chocolate in the period before caffeine, chocolate also shows up in a host of other media from painting and literature to royal decrees and pharmaceutical advertisements. These books and ephemera offer a different angle on both the cultural presence and meaning of chocolate. One of the funniest appearance of the drink in the eighteenth century is the cameo it makes in Voltaire’s satirical novel,

Pierre-Joseph Buc’hoz, a doctor of medicine and natural science by training, had every reason to write a book about chocolate in 1787. Though employed notably as the physician to king Stanislaw I of Poland, who was also the Duke of Lorraine, and then physician of Monsieur, the brother of Louis XVI and of the Count of Artois, he had a polymath’s interest in the nature of his region and beyond. Early on, he wrote on the flowers, medicinal plants, and even fossils from the regio