SC - 16th Century Recipes

[Mary Morman]

Saluti!

I forgot to mention - after the exhibition we went to a workshop entitled
"Chocolate: from Pod to Palate" by Sara Jayne Stanes (she's just put out a
book on chocolate for those addicts out there) ;-). She gave a brief history
of chocolate, mainly from after the Spanish arriving in South America, and
then showed us how chocolate is made and gave us a tasting session of 6 high
quality French chocolates. I learnt a lot, the most interesting bits being
cocoa bean melts at body temperature, the best quality chocolates are a
minimum 70% cocoa solids (apparently any less than that and you aren't
eating chocolate, merely tasting a chocolate flavoring), French quality
chocolates are currently better than Belgian (YMMV), the only
cocoa-producing nation that actually makes chocolate is Ghana and that only
in the last 10 years - all the others just export it to the rest of the
world, etc etc etc. 

But...(just to prove I'm not completely OOP) I talked to her later and asked
if she knew where I could find some cocoa beans, as I would like to try and
reproduce some of the recipes in "Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke." London,
1652, by Capt. John Wadsworth (the translation of a book by Melchor de Lara,
"Physitian General for the Kingdome of Spaine", 1631).  And she has very
kindly offered me a pound of her very own stock! So sometime in the next
couple of months I will hopefully get back to you all with the results.

Al Servizio Vostro, e del Sogno
Lucretzia

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Lady Lucrezia-Isabella di Freccia   |  mka Tina Nevin
Thamesreach Shire, The Isles, Drachenwald | London, UK
thorngrove at geocities.com | http://www.geocities.com/~thorngrove 
"There is no doubt that great leaders prefer hard drinkers to good
versifiers" - Aretino, 1536 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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