Chocolaty Valentine's Day
The event known as Valentine’s Day is both current and historical, legend and tangible practice, very old and very recent. What is the...
Massialot: Cooking with Chocolate
François Massialot published the second important cooking manual on seventeenth-century French cuisine. Credit for the first belongs to...
A Christmas Sermon about Chocolate
This week, in celebration of the Christmas holiday and in reverence to the snow and extreme cold, we take a break from the seventeenth...
The Brewmaster's Gadgets
Of all the writers on caffeinated drinks, Nicolas de Blégny, first physician to Louis XIV, goes furthest in turning them into a form of...
Dufour's Safari of Sociability
If the first edition of Dufour’s treatise presented itself as an introduction to hot beverage history for an uninitiated elite French...
Drug Harvest from God's Pharmacy
Along with women who wrote hot chocolate into cookbooks and letters, cultural critics reporting on social manners and habits were among...
Chocolatical Burn Notice
Although for decades in the seventeenth century European missionaries and merchants extolled chocolate’s curative properties and even...
Chocolate Fire
The Cacaosopher is veering off script today, in this first full post-election week, to draw an unlikely connection between the Parks &...
Hannah Woolley's Chaculate
By the mid-seventeenth century the wisdom of cookery, of which Lady Ann Fanshawe provides an excellent example, had also become part of a...
Chocolatical Cookery
Seventeenth-century treatises on cacao such as those featured here were published as medical literature or botanicals, and are now...