Cacaosophy

This week, in celebration of the Christmas holiday and in reverence to the snow and extreme cold, we take a break from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to remember one of the most unique ways chocolate has been memorialized as a winter drink in the United States. In the last Christmas sermon before he was shot and killed, poignantly entitled, “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” Martin Luther King, Jr. called on Americans to wake up to their dependence on the world. Peace r

Of all the writers on caffeinated drinks, Nicolas de Blégny, first physician to Louis XIV, goes furthest in turning them into a form of sociability. From a writer who did not have firsthand experience in Mesoamerica but did found the first medical journal in France, New Discoveries in all Areas of Medicine (Nouvelles découvertes sur toutes les parties de la médecine, 1679), one might expect abstraction and data. The Best Uses of Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate for Health and to Cu

If the first edition of Dufour’s treatise presented itself as an introduction to hot beverage history for an uninitiated elite French audience, the enhanced edition of 1685 expanded its target readership considerably. The New and Curious Treatise on Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate, a Work Equally Necessary to Physicians and All Those Who Care about Their Health announces its timeliness and its relevance to just about everyone. The preface leaves aside arguments about Providence an

Along with women who wrote hot chocolate into cookbooks and letters, cultural critics reporting on social manners and habits were among the first to herald the age of hot beverages at the French table. Already in cookbooks, which feature recipes ranging from medicinal cures and culinary favorites, chocolate could appear as both a drug and a food. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, the appraisal of chocolate as a medicine, still visible in Madame de Sévigné’s let