Cacaosophy

Although for decades in the seventeenth century European missionaries and merchants extolled chocolate’s curative properties and even readily encouraged chocoholism, consumer response to chocolate was full of burning twists and diabolical turns. Some of our best evidence for the variety of responses French drinkers could have to hot chocolate around the time of Dufour, was recorded in a series of letters by Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, the Marquise de Sévigné. Last week’s post c

The Cacaosopher is veering off script today, in this first full post-election week, to draw an unlikely connection between the Parks & Recreation comedy series and the 17th century’s Madame de Sévigné, the first vernacular advocate of chocolate as an immediate and indispensable antidote for misery. In response to the election results the P&R writers penned a letter to and America and specifically “young girls” in the voice of fictional character Pawnee Deputy Director of the

By the mid-seventeenth century the wisdom of cookery, of which Lady Ann Fanshawe provides an excellent example, had also become part of a wider discourse on household management. Like home recipes, it too was managed and written by women. Hannah Woolley has been called the early-modern Martha Stewart--I might say Julia Child, cooking made simple--and hailed as the first to publish guides to domestic success for women. In fact, her purview extended far beyond the home to advic