Cauliflory Inflorescence
Cacao trees fall into a special category of flowering plant: cauliflory. While most plants produce their blooms on new growth from the...
Happy New Year!
Turning over a new leaf. Gold leaf. Chocolate Set on a Stand 2 feet/60cm high Meissen, 1715-30
When and Why Chocolate, circa 1700
Limonadier, ière. Marchand qui vend de la limonade, de la liqueur et plusieurs autres sortes de liqueur, comme eaux de cerises, verjus,...
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...
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...
Como Agua para Chocolate
Codex Medoza, c. 1540. Attributed to Francisco Gualpuyogualcal and to Juan González. Transport method of cacao (next to jaguar skins)...
Sugar, Spice, and Everything Twice
The Coco-Nut Tree, 1739 Penelope Jephson was most famous for having married Simon Patrick, prolific bishop, anti-semite, and...
Literary Slumps and Slurps
If England had reached the southern New World before Spain, Portia’s Merchant suitors might have wisely chosen against the casket with...
Women's Work II
Broadside against coffee, one of many from the 1660s and 70s. Houghton Library, Harvard. The 1660s were a busy decade for writing about...
A Chocolate Doctrine of Discovery
Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma. Frontispiece, Chocolata inda, Trans. Johann Georg Volckamer, Nuremberg: Wolfgangi Enderi, 1644....