A Chocolate Doctrine of Discovery
Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma. Frontispiece, Chocolata inda, Trans. Johann Georg Volckamer, Nuremberg: Wolfgangi Enderi, 1644. Mythologizing has always been one of chocolate’s prime movers in Europe. From the first, it did not suffice to explain the benefits of the cacao bean. Its virtues had to be illustrated, poetically waxed, gilded with political purpose, made to gleam in the darkness of plague and famine, and served up as luxury on the finest dining tables. The early-mode
Women's Work I
Pieter Boudewyn Van Der Aa, Manière dont les habitants de la Nouvelle Espagne préparent le cacao pour le chocolat. Galerie Agréable du Monde. Leiden, 1728. BNF, PET FOL-VX-113 In spite of the masculinity of the preparers of cacao in the above 18th-C image, by all early-modern accounts women were the crushers of beans, keepers of recipes, and purveyors of the chocolate drink in the Aztec and then the newly settled Spanish New World empires. They were equally responsible for se