Chocolate

by Sarah Moss

  Chocolate remained characteristically Spanish until the end of the seventeenth century, although English and Italian friars had encountered it in New Spain a hundred years earlier. Chocolate was served to both inquisitors and victims of the Inquisition, including at public scenes of torture and execution, and was regarded by visitors as a speciality of the Spanish court. An Italian medical treatise of the mid-1600s makes reference to cocoa, but the first reliable evidence of chocolate being prepared and drunk outside Spain is from the court of Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany, where toasted cocoa beans were crushed and infused with jasmine flowers before being ground with sugar, vanilla and ambergris, which is a floral-smelling intestinal accretion of the sperm whale. At around the same date, the court of Louis XIII of France was served by two Italian cooks, who brought with them coffee, chocolate and tea. It was Louis XIV’s marriage to the Spanish Infanta Maria Theresa in the 1660s that brought a retinue of habitual chocolate drinkers to the court of the Sun King, from where Madame de Sévigné famously wrote to her daughter, marooned in the provinces, about the newly fashionable beverage.

  England in the second half of the seventeenth century might have been expected to afford less of a welcome to an expensive novelty from the courts of Catholic Europe. In 1642 the reign of Charles I collapsed into a civil war in which Charles was routinely identified with loose-living Continental Absolutist monarchs, in contrast to the Protestant clean living that his opponent Oliver Cromwell claimed to exemplify. The dominant, although contested, Puritan ethos regarded luxury, indulgence and sensuality as sinful, and rejected several foodstuffs on this principle. (It was Cromwell who is popularly said to have outlawed Christmas pudding as an inappropriate way of marking Jesus’ assumption of mortality.) At the same time, war – as ever – required increased ingenuity in the kitchen and also increased mobility among soldiers and those fleeing the country or their enemies, accelerating exposure to and use of new ingredients. The cookbooks which began to appear in the 165os, after the end of the civil war, in fact display a thirst for new, foreign flavours and recipes. Edward Phillips’s 1658 The New World of English Words, or, A General Dictionary Containing the Interpretations of such Hard Words as are Derived from Other Languages, defines chocolate as ‘a compounded Indian drink, whose chief ingredient is a fruit called Cocao’. It seems that the first chocolate houses, semi-public spaces more seemly than ale houses but more sociable than drinking at home, were established in London in the late 1650s. A flyer for M. Sury’s chocolate house ‘neare East gate’, published in Oxford in 1660, only ten years after the opening of the first English coffee house in the same city, is misleadingly titled ‘The vertues of the chocolate East-India drink’. This pamphlet promises prospective customers that ‘By this pleasing drink health is preserved, sicknesse diverted, It cures Consumptions and Cough of the Lungs; it expels poison, cleanseth the teeth, and sweetneth the Breath; provoketh Urine; cureth the stone and strangury, maketh Fatt and Corpulent, faire and aimeable, it cureth the running of the Reins, with sundry other desperate Diseases.’ The writer bursts into verse to explain the benefits to women:

  The gaming room at White’s chocolate house, from Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, 1735.

  Nor need the Women longer grieve,

  Who spend their oyle yet not Conceive,

  For ‘tis a Help Immediate,

  If such but Lick of Chocolate.

  The Nut-Browne Lasses of the Land,

  Whom Nature vail’d in Face and hand,

  Are quickly Beauties of High-Rate,

  By one small Draught of Chocolate.

  Many expensive and/or exotic substances were said to cure female infertility and promote beauty; one should probably not read too much into the attribution of these particular qualities to chocolate, but it is interesting that the stuff is advertised for its effects rather than its taste. Chocolate, like coffee in these decades, was still more part of the materia medica than an ingredient for domestic cooks. This is not to say that it was always taken, like modern prescribed drugs, to redress a particular problem, but was rather consumed to promote particular kinds of well-being, like drinking camomile tea before bed or espresso before work.

  Despite the rhyme on the Oxford flyer, chocolate was still consumed in seventeenth-century England mostly by men in the largely homosocial environment of chocolate houses. It used to be said that coffee-house culture was exclusively masculine, but although certainly the great majority of customers were men it is now clear that women owned and worked in the famous London coffee houses from their beginnings in the late seventeenth century until they were reincarnated as private clubs in the nineteenth century. There is no reason to believe that the shorter-lived chocolate houses were any different. The references to chocolate in Samuel Pepys’s diary place it squarely in this context; the first mention is in January 1660, when someone leaves ‘a Quantity of Chocolate’ at his house as a gift, but thereafter chocolate is an unquestioned part of the world of the upwardly mobile politician and intellectual that Pepys exemplifies. On 24 April 1661 Pepys wakes, ‘with my head in a sad taking through the last night’s drink, which I am very sorry for; so rose and went out with Mr Creed to drink our morning draft, which he did give me in chocolate.’ On 17 October 1662 Pepys, who made a great career in naval administration, discussed his successes with Lord Sandwich and then went

  Martin Engelbrecht, The Chocolate Drink, c. 1740.

  with Mr Creed to Westminster Hall, and by and by thither comes Captn. Ferrers, upon my sending for him, and we three to Creed’s chamber, and there sat a good while and drank chocolate. Here I am told how things go at Court; that the young men get uppermost, and the old serious lords are out of favour; that Sir H. Bennet, being brought into Sir Edward Nicholas’s place, Sir Charles Berkeley is made Privy Purse; a most vicious person, and one whom Mr Pierce, the surgeon, today (at which I laugh to myself), did tell me that he offered his wife £300 per annum to be his mistress.3

  Chocolate is what professional men with powerful positions at court and in government drank while exchanging news. In this light, chocolate’s role in late seventeenth-century England seems more like its role in pre-Conquest Tenochtitlan than either early modern Mesoamerica or Louis XIV’s Versailles.

  Early in the eighteenth century, recipes using chocolate as an ingredient began to appear in English cookbooks. At first there are instructions for making the drink served in chocolate houses at home, which give a sense of how much conventions had changed since the Spanish began to replicate Moctezuma’s ceremonial drink at home. The Accomplis’d Female Instructor, published in London in 1704, gives this recipe:

  To make Chocolate the best way.

  Take an equal Proportion of Water and Milk, let them well incorporate in Boyling, but continually stir them, lest they burn to the Bottom; so having grated or beaten your Chocolate Cakes fine, put to a Quart of the Liquor an Ounce and a half or two Ounces, if you would have it rich, then take it off the Fire, and put to it two Yolks of new lay’d Eggs well beaten up with as much fine Sugar dissolved in Rose-water, as will sweeten it; then mill it with a Milling-stick, till it becomes thick, and so pour it into dishes.

  This drink – or perhaps, given the egg yolks, custard – is well on the way to modern ‘hot chocolate’. The spices are gone, replaced by rose water, which may represent the ghost of the Maya ‘ear flowers’ but is a standard ingredient of English sweet dishes from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Milk has joined water as the base of the drink, perhaps because of the egg thickener. But sugar is still added to taste and the Spanish molinillo survives in the ‘Milling-stick’. The cakes, of course, are not chocolate cake as we would now recognize it, but cacao in its solid, processed form. It is easy to see how, within a decade or two of entering the domestic kitchen, this hybrid became a dessert. Similar ingredients are combined in two different ways in early eighteenth-century English cookery. Recipes for ‘Chocolate Cream’ dissolve chocolate in a little boiling water and then add a pint of
cream and two eggs per quarter pound of chocolate, beat it until it boils, allow it to cool, and then beat it again ‘that it may go up with a Froth’. This is in the old English tradition of creams and syllabubs. The alternative is a kind of macaroon. The second edition of Mary Kettilby’s Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physic and Surgery; For the use of All Good Wives, Tender Mothers, and Careful Nurses, published in London in 1719, includes ‘Lemon or Chocolate-Puffs’:

  Take half a pound of Double-refin’d Sugar, finely beat and sifted, grate into it the yellow rind of a very fair large Lemon; then whip up the White of an Egg to a froth, and wet it with this froth, ’till ’tis as stiff as a good working Paste, lay it on Papers and bake it in a very slow Oven; lay some round and some long: If you make Chocolate, grate about an ounce as you did the Peel.

  Chocolate had begun to be used in Italian cookery two or three decades earlier. Elizabeth David, in Harvest of the Cold Months: A Social History of Ice and Ices (1994), describes a household management book by Antonio Latini published in Naples in the early 1690s, which gives a recipe for – or perhaps account of – a chocolate sorbet. Equal weights of unsweetened chocolate and sugar were beaten with approximately three times their combined weight in water and ‘worked or stirred, it would seem from Latini’s hazy instructions, during the whole of the freezing process. The mousse was to be served as soon as it was frozen.’ Like the chocolate creams and ‘puffs’, this sorbet would have been served as part of the dessert course, meant for spectacle more than nourishment, which appeared as the grand finale of the most formal meals and banquets in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The presence of these dishes in cookbooks signals that they were available at least as objects of aspiration to those of the gentry who, unable to afford fully trained professional cooks who would not have needed written recipes, were nevertheless willing to invest in expanding their own tastes (at least in theory, since it is by no means obvious that people who buy cookbooks cook and eat the dishes in them). These are class-specific, and they are also, of course, distinctively European creations which would have been unrecognizable in Mesoamerica.

  Drinking chocolate became an established part of the eighteenth-century breakfast in France and England, but recipes for chocolate cakes, tarts, mousses and creams also proliferated. When the English dined at midday, as most did until the late seventeenth century, breakfast seems to have been an informal snack of whatever leftovers were around. Dinner, especially for the aristocracy, became steadily later through the eighteenth century, eventually displacing ‘supper’ (previously taken before retiring to bed) and creating a vacancy for what became ‘lunch’. A later dinner meant that there was more emphasis on breakfast, which became a meal in itself rather than a way of getting by until dinner, and the upper classes took to convening at ten in the morning to eat various kinds of bread, toast and plain cakes accompanied by coffee or chocolate. It is in this context that beautiful silver and porcelain chocolatieres were produced. Like coffee pots, except that they still had holes in the lids for the molinillo or milling-stick, these chocolatieres are often shown in mideighteenth-century family portraits, as if they represent the temperate sociability of the Georgian aristocratic ideal. His friend Hester Thrale Piozzi’s account of Samuel Johnson’s use of chocolate illustrates the idea of the chocolatiere as the centrepiece of morally improving domestic conversation. She writes:

  Pietro Longhi, Morning Chocolate, c. 1750.

  Georg David Matthieu, Seated Portrait of Herzogin Louise Friederike zu Mecklenburg-Schwerin opening a letter, 1770s.

  With regard to drink, his liking was for the strongest, as it was not the flavour, but the effect, he sought for ... For the last twelve years, however, he left off all fermented liquors. To make himself some amends, indeed, he took his chocolate liberally, pouring in large quantities of cream, or even melted butter; and was so fond of fruit, that though he usually ate seven or eight large peaches of a morning ... and treated them with proportionate attention after dinner, yet I have heard him protest that he never had quite as much as he wished of wall-fruit.

  Chocolate here works as an interesting replacement for ‘the strongest drink’, one which is associated with the insatiable appetite for the rare luxury of peaches. Hot-house and wall-grown fruit were available only to those who commanded substantial estates and skilful gardeners, so to say that one could not get enough wall-fruit would be like regretting the lack of alpine strawberries or quail’s eggs. Chocolate, or at least chocolate with the excessive enrichment of cream and butter, seems to come close to this category.

  Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, The Penthievre Family, or the Cup of Chocolate, 1768.

  Jean-Etienne Liotard, The Chocolate Girl, c.1743—5.

  As this vignette suggests, the orderly domesticity of the leisured families gathered around chocolatieres in eighteenth-century portraiture is not always reflected in the literature of the period. From the writings of the Marquis de Sade at one extreme to those of Jane Austen at the other, chocolate in later eighteenth-century literature is almost invariably associated with a degenerate, loose-living aristocracy, addicted to luxury and oblivious to the suffering of the poor. (This could, of course, be the view from the other side of the silk-clad families enjoying their slave-grown chocolate of a morning.) It is here that we see chocolate being feminized in England after its association with the distinctly masculine environment of the coffee house in the seventeenth century.

  Histories of chocolate often cite the gastronomic tastes of the Marquis de Sade as evidence of chocolate’s innately erotic appeal. De Sade’s fiction involves the frequent consumption of chocolate before and during sexual orgies, and his letters to his wife, usually from prison, contain repeated, urgent requests for all kinds of confectionery. The interest in chocolate in the pornographic fiction is explicitly related to coprophagy, and a strand of chocolate scholarship explores this relationship in more detail, but in fact when de Sade was grooming prostitutes in real life he tended to give them confections containing aniseed and, allegedly, the aphrodisiac cantharides (Spanish fly) in order to provoke lust and wind. There is little evidence that either was effective, and indeed little evidence that de Sade’s practises bore much relation to his fiction. De Sade’s prison letters to his wife make many demands for clean linen, particular toiletries and all sorts of cakes and sweets. On 16 May 1779, he upbraids Madame de Sade for failing to fulfil his order:

  The sponge cake is not at all what I asked for. 1st, I wanted it iced all over, underneath and on top, with the same icing as the little cakes; 2nd I wanted it to have chocolate inside, and there isn’t even the least trace of chocolate. I beg you to have it sent to me at the first opportunity, and make sure that someone trustworthy puts the chocolate in. The cakes must smell of it, as if you’re biting into a bar of chocolate.

  On 15 June 1783 he writes:

  First of all I need linen, very definitely, or I’m out of here; four dozen meringues, two dozen big cakes; four dozen vanilla pastilles with chocolate, and not an unspeakable drug like the one you sent before.4

  Any relationship between chocolate and sex here is clearly one of substitution. The combination of specificity and sensuality, the precision about both how the cake should be iced and how it should feel to smell it, recalls de Sade’s highly organized approach to debauchery in Les 120 Journées de Sodome. But it is worth noting that, as devotees of rare and expensive chocolate usually point out, those who ‘need’ chocolate usually need it in a very sugary form. De Sade is not asking for the best South American cocoa, or demanding a chocolatiere or a molinillo. He wants ‘biscuit de Savoie’, a fat-free sponge cake, with a great deal of icing, and then he wants meringues, cakes and vanilla and chocolate candies, foods that require time, expertise and effort to produce. De Sade’s irritation with the inadequacies of previous care packages emphasizes his impotence and frustration in these transactions. These requests are reminiscent of the fantasies of lost polar explorers or the prota
gonists of children’s fiction, people for whom food displaces the normal adult interests in money and sex. Food histories tend to quote the paragraphs about chocolate, but de Sade also demands gloves, powder, toiletries, candles (different sizes for different times of day) and books. It’s not about chocolate but about power and gratification behind bars, and if chocolate offers one of several ways of exercising this power it is because, like the other commodities, it signifies class. De Sade requires his wife to send him the trappings of aristocratic life in late eighteenth-century France, to prove her enduring loyalty despite his disgrace and so he can prove that, regardless of the convictions for rape, sodomy and assault and the growing certainty of a life of incarceration, he is still a Marquis of the ancien régime.

  De Sade is an extreme case, but the association of chocolate with the personal and political sins of the aristocracy in the late eighteenth century is strong. The beginning of Frances Burney’s second novel, Cecilia, establishes the heroine’s status as ‘heiress to an estate of 3000 pounds per annum’, ‘the accumulating possessions of a rising and prosperous family’. Since we meet Cecilia at the breakfast given to mark her departure from her childhood home, the first chapter has to work hard and fast to equip the heroine with all she requires to remain aristocratic in the reader’s mind through the hundreds of pages of tribulations that follow. Chocolate forms part of this shorthand, as the foolish Mr Morrice ‘studious to recommend himself’ to the wealthy orphan and ‘indifferent by what means’, ‘eagerly offered to assist her with cakes, chocolate, or whatever the table afforded’. In Jane Austen’s novels of upper middle-class life it is only the very rich and autocratic General Tilney who drinks chocolate, while Caroline Austen’s reminiscences of life at Steventon Rectory suggest the correct estimate of chocolate. Looking back from the 1870s, Caroline remembers her sister Anna’s wedding: