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When Chocolate was Medicine:
Colmenero, Wadsworth, and Dufour beverage (n.)
bebida
By Christine Jones

In the seventeenth century,
Europeans who had not traveled
overseas tasted coffee, hot
chocolate, and tea for the
very first time. For this brand-
new clientele, the brews
of foreign beans and leaves
carried within them the wonder and
danger of far-away lands. They were
classified at first not as food, but as drugs — pleasant-tasting,
with recommended dosages prescribed by pharmacists and
physicians, and dangerous when self-administered. As they
warmed to the use and abuse of hot beverages, Europeans
frequently experienced moral and physical confusion brought
on by frothy pungency, unpredictable effects, and even
(rumor had it) fatality. Madame de Sévigné, marquise and
diarist of court life, famously cautioned her daughter about
chocolate in a letter when its effects still inspired awe tinged
with fear: “And what do we make of chocolate? Are you not
afraid that it will burn your blood? Could it be that these
miraculous effects mask some kind of inferno [in the body]?”

These mischievously potent drugs were met with widespread
curiosity and concern. In response, a written tradition of
treatises was born over the course of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Physicians and tradesmen who
claimed knowledge of fields from pharmacology to etiquette
proclaimed the many health benefits of hot drinks or issued
impassioned warnings about their abuse. The resulting
textual tradition documents how the tonics afraid
were depicted during the first century of issued
their hotly debated place among Europe’s Glossary on
pages 91
delicacies. and 92

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