Cacaosophy

Early-Modern Ideas about Chocolate

THE CHOCOLATICAL BLOG

Surely and Good Enough, or Witty Orthography

Surely and Good Enough, or Witty Orthography

Dorothy Shirley and Ann Goodenough’s recipes round out the panoply of inventive applications for and spellings of chocolate in seventeenth-century England. Their countryman, William Hughes, had compiled a list of ways to write the word back in 1672. Hughes' The American Physician takes its cue from the famous mid-century herbal by Nicolas Culpeper, The English Physcian. Culpeper famously believed in the intellectual value of experience and first-hand observation. In that sens

Like Chocolate, Like Syllabub

Like Chocolate, Like Syllabub

On a recent trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library, I had the opportunity to read cover-to-cover extant seventeenth-century family recipe books of the English household. The above pages from Margaret Baker's family Receipt Book offer a glimpse into the material fascination of bound manuscripts. ‘Receipt books’ as they were then called burst with details about life, health, and culinary predilections. They are generally penned by women of the family and remain, for the most pa