ANST - Chocolate..Period or not...

[Virginia Gatling]

FYI.....
This is a passage on chocolate from my WD encyclopedia of cookery vol.3
printed 1966, even though this is not a "period resource" it may help
with the chocolate lovers documentation "chuckle".. Quote
.."CHOCOLATE-Chocolate and its brother, cocoa, are made from the beans
of the cacao tree, a perennial evergreen tree of the cola family,
botanically called Theobroma, or "food of the gods." The cacao tree is
native to the hot humid forests of the Amazon basin, and it flourishes
only in tropical climates. Chocolate is a mixture of roasted cocoa,
cocoa butter [also obtained from the cacao bean], and a very fine sugar.

It is truly a product of the New World. The word comes from the Mexican
Indian choco, "foam," and alt, "water." It is said that Columbus brought
some home to Spain with him, but the first Europeans to see it used were
the Spaniards who invaded Mexico under Cortez in 1519. There they found
chocolate in common use, flavored with spices, but unsweetened. It was
the royal drink of the Aztec: the Emperor Montezuma drank his chocolate
from golden ceremonial goblets. Cocoa beans were also used as money.
Cortez introduced chocolate as a hot drink to Spain, where sugar and
vanilla flavoring were added to it. By 1580 it was in common use and
extremely popular. The Spaniards tried to hold on to their monopoly of
the cocoa bean and the chocolate drink, and managed to do so for a
hundred years. But in the middle of the 1600's, when the Spanish
princess Maria Theresa married  Louis XIV, the French  stared using
chocolate. At about the same time cocoa began to be cultivated in the
British West Indies and advertised in London. Chocolate shops sprang up
throughout Europe, and the fashionables of the day sipped and gossiped
in them."..... End of quote, and it goes on... I don't know how this
holds up for truth but it is interesting.
 Regina

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