SC - FW: Fields of Gold information

[Valoise Armstrong]

Bear wrote:

>It was definitely not found in 1492.  It was found in Mexico on Hernando
>Cortez's expedition of 1520.  The beans were probably not delivered to Spain
>until 1527 with the end of the Conquest or 1528, when Cortez was relieved of
>command and returned to Spain.  Apparently cocoa as a drink became popular
>in Spain about 1580 and spread to the rest of Europe early in the 17th
>Century.

The popularity of a cocoa drink among Spanish nobility may have taken off
pretty quickly. There is an anonymous novel called _Lazarillo de Tormes_
that was first published in 1554. In it the main character, a street
beggar, enters the house of a down-on-his-luck nobleman and notes that:

"I hadn't seen anything but walls, not a chocolate grinder or a block for
chopping meat or a bench or a table..."

Would seem to imply that by 1554 a chocolate grinder would be expected to
be among the most basic furnishings of the minor nobolity.

Valoise


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