Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

>f£ ä >1: ■: ■i uDøvvwranxxuiow HISTORY OF COCOA AND CHOCOLATE 19 of the character of the beverage prepared from the cacao bean in the seventeenth Century : Take a hundred cacao kerneis (that is about a quarter of a pound), two heads of Chili or long peppers, a handful of amse or orievala and two of mesachusil or vanilla, or instead, six Alexandria roses, powdered,—two drachms of cinnamon, a dozen almonds, and as many hazel-nuts, a half-pound of white sugar and annotto enough to colour it, and you have the king of chocolates. From an English edition we learn that the new drink, chocolate, was taken frequently at Oxford in 1650, that is a year after King Charles was beheaded. The first cocoa house was advertised in 1657, and was to be found in Bishopsgate Street in Queen’s Head Alley. Other houses, both in London and Amsterdam, were soon opened, and chocolate became and remained a fashionable drink, the different chocolate houses and clubs being the resorts of characteristic sections of the elite. This was about the time that the frequentmg of coffee houses was passing from the fashionable to the populace, and the elegant and refined began to forgather at the chocolate houses. After the Restoration the price of chocolate was about 10s. to 15s. a pound. As chocolate was new, costly and delicious, one can. understand that it added to the self-satisfaction, already exquisite, of those who sipped it. The seventeenth Century saw cocoa pass triumphantly through the war of wit that all new things must encounter. Those who knew a little praised it as a poet sings of his love, and those who knew less con-demned it lavishly out of the wealth of their ignorance. According to some writers one could live fully on chocolate alone ; it quenched the thirst and allayed fevers ; it was the milk of old men, and was a hive of secret virtues. On the other hand, Joseph Acosta in his Historie of the East and West Indies, 1604, wrote .