Bow Your Hamms to Chocolate February 4, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
[[an onion]]
Dieticians and quacks have long tried to convince humanity that certain foods can work wonders on our failing bodies. Beachcombing’s favourite example is Baldini’s De sorbetti (1775) where it is argued that Neapolitan ice-cream will cure everything from sniffles to tumours (another post another day). But there are others from, in the nineteenth century, Kellogs with his enemas and cornflakes to James H. Salisbury making the case that man is three-quarter carnivore. And just recently a new form of dietary madness has floated onto Beachcombing’s radar: the early modern obsession with life-giving chocolate.
Now chocolate does, of course, have excellent qualities: one of the great gifts of the New World to the old – for which we gave them small pox and rifles… And understandably with that coarse bitter taste the new food excited attention in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The first text to champion chocolate was Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate (1631) by Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, an interesting book that has a lot going for it. But when Colmenero’s books was translated into other languages his sensible-(ish) early modern propositions were exaggerated beyond reason.
Take James Wadsworth’s ‘translation’ into English in (1651). The title alone gives some sense of the violence that had been done to the text: Chocolate, or An Indian Drinke. By the wise and moderate use whereof, health is preserved, sickness diverted, and cured, especially the plague of the guts, vulgarly called the new disease, fluxes, consumptions, and coughs of the lungs, with sundry other desperate diseases. By it also conception is caused, the birth hastened and facilitated ,beauty gained and continued.
Wadsworth includes some doggerel to convince his readers of the coming chocolate revolution, doggerel that we append here.
Doctors lay by your irksome Book
And allye Petty-Fogging Rookes
Leave Quacking and Enucleate
The Vertues of our Chocolate
Let th’Universall Medicine
(Made up of Dead-mens Bones and Skin)
Be henceforth Illegitimate
And yield to Soveraigne-Chocolate
Let Bawdy-Baths be us’d no more
Nor Smoaky-Stoves but by the whore
Of Babilon: since Happy-fate
Hath Blessed us with Chocolate
Let all the Paracelsian Crew
Who can Extract Christian from Jew;
Or Out of Monarchy, A State
Breake all their Stills for Chocolate
Nore need women longer grieve
Who spend their Oyle, yet not conceive
For ‘tis a Helpe Immediate
If such but Lick of Chocolate
Twill make old women Young and Fresh
Create new motions of the Flesh
And cause them long for you know what
If they but tast of Chocolate
Both High and Low, both Rich and Poor
My Lord, my Lady, and his —
With all the Folkes at Billingsgate
Bow, Bow your Hamms to Chocolate
Beachcombing loves that last line.
Any other early modern or modern dieticians who go lose their heads over a particular food? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Note that Beachcombing is less interested in those who preach the exclusion of a food from the diet, a more vulgar and commonplace category.
