[Sca-cooks] OT Drugs and tobacco

Gretchen Beck grm at andrew.cmu.edu
Mon Mar 3 18:46:45 PST 2008



--On Monday, March 03, 2008 8:09 PM -0500 "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus 
Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net> wrote:

>> Today's conversation turned
>> into a void as we have no references between the 16th and the 19th C
>> so
>> to speak, off hand.
>
> I can see how it might have...

I'm not sure it's so much a void, as not something most people on this list 
have studied, it being not food and not pre-1650. It's also a more 
specialized field of study than, say, food.

Some random lookups find:
  From Britannica Online (search.eb.com)
   Cigar - By 1600 the cigar had been introduced into Spain, where it was a 
symbol of conspicuous wealth for two centuries before it was widely used in 
other European countries.

    Cigarette - Early in the 16th century beggars in Sevilla (Seville) 
began to pick up discarded cigar butts, shred them, and roll them in scraps 
of paper (Spanish papeletes) for smoking, thus improvising the first 
cigarettes. These poor man's smokes were known as cigarrillos (Spanish: 
"little cigars"). Late in the 18th century they acquired respectability and 
their use spread to Italy and Portugal; they were carried by Portuguese 
traders to the Levant and Russia. French and British troops in the 
Napoleonic Wars became familiar with them; the French named them 
cigarettes. Forty years later another generation of French and British 
troops, fighting in the Crimean War, made the acquaintance of Turkish 
cigarettes.

    Snuff - The practice of inhaling snuff became popular in England around 
the 17th century; during the 18th century it was widespread throughout the 
world. At first, each quantity was freshly grated. Rappee (French râpé, 
"grated") is the name later given to a coarse, pungent snuff made from dark 
tobacco. Snuff takers carried graters with them; early 18th-century graters 
made of ivory and other materials still exist, as do elaborate snuffboxes. 
(just as a sidenote, both historical romances of the 20th C and 18th C 
theater are filled with references to snuff).

and some articles from jstor.org
XVIII Century Vanities, by C. Louise Avery
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin © 1924
"Louis XIV detested tobacco in any form and would not permit anyone at his 
court to take snuff in his presence; nevertheless, the custom spread 
amazingly and in the eighteenth century the man of fashion frequently went 
about with four or five snuffboxes in his pocket and owned many more. At 
the time of his death Frederick the Great had a collection of fifteen 
hundred."


Dutch Tobacco Boxes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue, by 
Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide
Metropolitan Museum Journal © 1988
notes "The importance of tobacco in Dutch life is evidence by the frequent 
portrayal of smokers and their paraphernalia in  seventeenth-century 
paintings and engravings..In "The Procuress" by Jacob Duck (ca 1600-1667), 
for instance, an open tobacco box, a clay pipe, and a folder paper 
containing tobacco are clearly visible on the floor...Sill lifes of the 
period sometimes display a whole range of smokers' articles. A good example 
of this, a still life by Pieter Claesz (1597/1661), incorporates a clay 
pipe, a bundle of matches, a folded paper of blended tobacco, an 
earthenware brassier, and an open pewter box for tobacco."

And that's just for a start -- lots of tobacco and tobacco paraphenalia out 
there for the 17th and 18th C.

toodles, margaret






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