The World of Caffeine (12 page)

We know from these references and others that the English were becoming increasingly familiar with chocolate over the next fifty years. In 1648, Thomas Gage, the Dominican who had traveled throughout the New World, told his countrymen, in
New Survey of the West Indies,
with the air of imparting a traveler’s oddity, that, among the natives, “All rich or poor, loved to drink plain chocolate without sugar or other ingredients,” presupposing that his readers expected chocolate to be mixed with these things.
⁹

In 1655, during Cromwell’s Protectorate, England acquired some flourishing cacao plantations, which were to become her main sources for the bean, when she wrested Jamaica from Spanish control. In London, in 1657, an expatriate Parisian shopkeeper, proprietor of the city’s first chocolate house, advertised in the
Public Adviser,
“In Bishopgate Street, in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West India drink called chocolate, to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time, and also unmade at reasonable rates.”
¹⁰

In contrast with Spain and France, where both coffee and cacao were initially trappings of the aristocracy, in England, as in Holland, both were sold to the public in shops almost from the start, to consume there or take out, although at ten to fifteen shillings a pound, these earliest “reasonable rates” were so high that only the prosperous could afford to partake frequently.

Thus, within only five years after London’s first coffeehouse brewed its first cup of coffee in the mid-1660s, competition had arisen from another caffeinated beverage. From about 1675 to 1725 chocolate drinking in coffeehouses was very common, but by 1750 the practice had dwindled to an oddity. Samuel Pepys, who is often associated with the early coffeehouse life of the city, first tried chocolate in 1662 and adopted it, not coffee, as his “morning draft.” The oldest surviving English chocolate pot, specially designed to serve hot chocolate, was made by silversmith George Garthorne in 1685. The chocolate pot was similar in design to the coffeepot, but featured a hole in its hinged finial through which the Spanish moliné, then called a “mill,” was inserted.

Two upscale chocolate houses, White’s and the Cocoa Tree, were established in the 1690s. Schivelbusch, in
Tastes of
Paradise,
says that these chocolate houses had a culture of their own, readily distinguishable from the coffeehouses, which he describes as bourgeois and puritanical. The chocolate houses or chocolate parlors, in contrast, were “meeting places for an odd mixture of aristocracy and demimonde, what Marx would later refer to as the
bohème;
in any case, they were thoroughly antipuritanical, perhaps even bordello-like places.”
¹¹

The English experimented with methods of preparing chocolate, concocting a caudle, or warm spiced gruel, mixed with egg yolk and wine, of the sort then commonly served to invalids or women lying in, surely one of the least appealing ways ever devised for consuming methylxanthines. By about 1730, they had improved the drink by introducing milk in place of or mixed with water.

In England, as elsewhere, tariffs played a major part in determining which of the caffeinated beverages was most used at different times. The alternating vogues, first for coffee, then for tea, and in the rise and fall of chocolate consumption, can be charted from the rising and falling import duties from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, when the English duty dropped to a penny a pound, that chocolate attained the general use it enjoys there to this day.

The biggest breakthrough in cacao-processing technology came in 1828, when a Dutch chemist, Coenraad J.Van Houten, patented a press that removed most of the bitter fat, which accounts for more than half the weight, from the ground, roasted beans. He also developed the process of alkalization, still called the “Dutch process,” to neutralize acids and make the resulting powder more soluble in water. Through the use of Van Houten’s invention, two distinct products were produced: a hard
cacao cake and cacao butter. The cake was ground into a soluble powder, from which most of the bitterness of the original cacao had been removed along with the fat, and which became very popular as a flavoring. Previously, bakers had been unable to concoct appealing chocolate-flavored pastries because of cacao’s bitterness and graininess. The famous Viennese Sacher Torte, first served in 1832, could not have been prepared before Van Houten.
¹²
Cocoa butter, the other product of the Van Houten process, was the basis of chocolate for eating so familiar to us today. One of the first to produce it was Fry and Sons, of Bristol, who made chocolate bars in 1847. During this time,
Lancet,
the leading British medical journal, published its analysis of fifty brands of commercial cacao, finding that 90 percent were adulterated with starch fillers or, horrible to contemplate, brick dust and toxic red lead pigment. Cadbury’s stood out as selling a pure product. The most important remaining innovations in chocolate technology were accomplished in Switzerland, when Henri Nestlé invented condensed milk and joined forces with Daniel Peter in 1875 to create the world’s first milk chocolate. Also in Switzerland at this time, Rudolph Lindt devised “conching,” a process by which granite rollers were applied to cacao paste in shell-shaped containers to improve its fineness and homogeneity.

These refinements in processing engendered a complex and sometimes confusing lexicon of terms. The plant
(Theobroma
cacao)
and unprocessed parts of it are called “cacao.” “Chocolate” is a dried paste pressed from the bitter powder of the ground, roasted beans, called “cacao beans” or “cocoa beans,” or the drink made by crumbling this paste and stirring it into hot water. “Cacao powder” or “cocoa powder” is chocolate with most of its bitter fat removed by further pressing, sometimes processed to increase its solubility. “Chocolate liquor” (so called because it starts as a liquid), and “chocolate matter” or “baking chocolate,” a thick, dark paste, are by-products of pressing. “Eating chocolate” is cacao powder mixed with sugar and with “cacao butter” or “cocoa butter,” a light-colored fat that is another by-product of pressing. “Milk chocolate” is eating chocolate with dried milk added.

Consumption has increased more than tenfold since the turn of the twentieth century, commercial cacao cultivation having spread around the world in a belt within twenty degrees of the equator and the varieties of chocolate-flavored confections having proliferated wildly. However, unlike coffee and tea, which, after reaching Europe, were embraced equally by peoples of every continent, the love of chocolate is still developing in Africa and never took hold in the Far East. Even today, it takes a thousand Japanese to eat as many chocolate bars as a typical Englishman in a year.

Considering their American provenance, cacao beans came surprisingly late and by a surprisingly circuitous route to North America, where they were first sold by a Boston apothecary in 1712, having been imported, oddly enough, from England, to which they had earlier been shipped from the West Indies. For many years, only pharmacists sold cacao in the New World colonies, and they used it as an ingredient in their compounded medicines, or “confections.” As with coffee and tea in their early days in Europe, chocolate in the colonies was consumed for its medicinal value and did not immediately achieve its English currency as a tasty and stimulating treat. It was only in 1755 that imports to North America directly from the West Indies were initiated. In 1765, John Hannon, an Irish immigrant, turned an old mill into the first cacao factory in North America.
¹³
Nearly one hundred and fifty years had passed since cacao’s arrival in Europe before cacao came home to the northern part of the hemisphere from which it originated. Once it had done so, it became extremely popular. Milton Snavely Hershey, a veteran sugar candy and caramel maker, bought the German chocolate-manufacturing machinery that he saw exhibited at the 1893 Chicago Exposition and sold his first chocolate bar in 1894. In the ensuing halfcentury, “Hershey bar” became almost a generic name for any chocolate candy bar. In the venerable tradition of using caffeinated seeds and nuts as the basis of highenergy foods, the United States issued chocolates as rations to American soldiers during World War II.

After Marco Polo returned to tell tales of his travels in Cathay (1275–94), Venice, increasingly a center of trade and a crossroads for traffic from the East, grew eager to learn more of strange peoples and their strange goods. However, vividly detailed and inclusive as it was, Marco Polo’s book does not mention tea, save in connection with the imperial tax that was levied on its use, reporting that, in 1285, a Chinese minister of finance promulgated an arbitrary increase. Polo failed to say more about tea because, from the standpoint of a visitor to the Mongol court of the Khan, tea was an inconsequential predilection of the subject native Chinese population.

Tea was described, however, in later Venetian travelers’ accounts. After Polo, it was first named in print in the West in 1559 as
“Chai Catai”
or the “tea of China,” in the posthumous publication
Navigatione et Viaggi,
or
Voyages and Travels,
by Giambattista Ramusio (1485–1557), a Venetian author celebrated for accounts of voyages in ancient and modern times. While abroad, Ramusio heard about tea from Hajji Mahommed (or Chaggi Memet), a Persian caravan merchant. After this early notice in Venice, tea was not mentioned again in any known Italian book until 1588, when a 1565 letter of the Florentine Father Almeida was published by the famous author Giovanni Maffei as part of his voluminous collection of traveler’s papers,
Four Books of Selected Letters from India
(Florence).

At the same time that the Venetian travelers were making their way back and forth overland to the East in furtherance of the ancient spice trade, the Portuguese explorers, excited by the example of Columbus, were searching for new ways to get to new places. In 1497 Vasco da Gama discovered a sea route to the Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope. In consequence, the Portuguese were able to expand their explorations eastward, relying on superior armaments to displace the Arab seamen who until then had controlled the exotic trade from India and beyond. They founded a settlement at Malacca on the Malay peninsula. Sailing from Malacca in 1516, the Portuguese became the first Europeans to reach China by sea, where they found favorable opportunities for trade. To make the most of these rich markets, a fleet was soon dispatched to the commercial ports, and an ambassador was sent to Peking. By 1540 the Portuguese had even reached Japan. Finally, as a result of diplomatic persuasions, in 1557 the Chinese allowed them to settle and erect a trading post at Macao, near the estuary of the Canton River (now called the Pearl River).

The Portuguese traders and the Portuguese Jesuit priests, who like Jesuits of every nation busied themselves with the affairs of caffeine, wrote frequently and favorably to compatriots in Europe about tea. Strangely enough, there is no record of their sending tea shipments from the East for the enjoyment of their countrymen. In 1556, Father Gasper Da Cruz, a missionary, became the first to preach Catholicism in China; when he returned home in 1560, he wrote and published the first mention of tea in Portuguese, “a drink called
ch’a,
which is somewhat bitter, red, and medicinall.”
¹
Another Portuguese cleric, Father Alvaro Semedo, in 1633 wrote an early account of the tea plant and the preparation of the beverage in his book about China,
Relatione della Grande Monarchia della Cina
(1643). He mentions the custom, initiated at the Han Pass by Yin Hsi, of offering tea to guests, and explains that when it is offered for the third time, it is time for the guest to move along.

The adventurous Portuguese, though they charted new sea routes for trade around the world, and whose people were the first to enjoy the new influx of spices, silks, and other amenities, failed to participate in the early movement of caffeinated commodities to Europe. Oddly, they were soon to play a seminal role in the tea enthusiasm of England, through the agency of the Portuguese infanta Catherine of Braganza. Her story, as the bringer of many exotic luxuries to her somewhat unsophisticated adopted homeland, when she became the wife of King Charles II, we tell in a later chapter.

For a few decades, the Portuguese faced no competition on the sea routes from the other European powers. England dreamed the impossible dream of sailing across the Atlantic to find a northern sea route to correspond with Magellan’s southern one, while the Swedes and Danes fancied they could discover a similar northern sea route eastward to China. The Germans, weighted down by domestic political conflicts, never even set sail.

However, by closing their trading settlements to rival nations, the Portuguese virtually compelled the English, Dutch, Swedes, Danes, and others to seek out genuine trade opportunities for themselves. In addition to providing stimulus to the Dutch enterprise occasioned by example and exclusion, the Portuguese helped to bring word of tea to their Dutch competitors through the accounts of Jan Hugo van Linschoten (1563–1611), a Dutch navigator and intrepid traveler, who sailed with the Portuguese fleet. In his
Linschoten’s Travels
(1595), which was translated into English and published in London in 1598, this redoubtable man penned some of the earliest European descriptions of tea and tea drinking, as he met with them in Japan:

Engraving from Dufour’s 1685 treatise on coffee, tea, and chocolate. This French engraving features a contemporary European impression of a Chinese man with his pot of tea and the porcelain cup and saucer in which the tea was served. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)

Here we find some of the trappings Europeans still associate with Japan, including saki and chopsticks. As a result of this information and the interest it engendered in Lin Schoten’s countrymen, the introduction of tea to Europe became the work of the Dutch, the great trading rivals of the Portuguese. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Dutch ship, sailing from Macao to the port of Amsterdam, brought the first bale of green tea leaves to the Continent. In 1641, the Dutch captured
Malacca from the Portuguese and signed a ten-year truce at The Hague ratifying their conquest. The Dutch became the only Europeans allowed to trade in Japan until 1853.

Before the international trade in coffee began, private persons had brought small quantities of coffee beans into Europe. In 1596, Charles de I’Écluse (
Lat.
Carolus Clusius) (1524–1609), a French-Dutch physician and botanist, received from an Italian correspondent what were probably the first beans to cross the Alps.
³
Within the next decade, Pieter van dan Broeck brought the first beans from Mocha to Holland. But Siegmund Wurffbain (1613–61), a German merchant-traveler, became the first to sell Mocha beans there commercially in 1640. Regular imports to Holland from the Yemen began only in 1663. It is reported that Pasqua Rosée, known to have opened the first coffeehouse in London in 1652, sold coffee publicly in Holland in 1664. Shortly thereafter, the first Dutch coffeehouse was opened in The Hague, and others soon appeared in Amsterdam and Haarlem. The first commercial shipment of Java coffee from the Dutch East Indian plantations, amounting to less than a thousand pounds, did not arrive in Amsterdam until 1711.

The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, investigated the possibility of importing coffee to Holland from the port of Aden in the Yemen as early as 1614, but failed to do so. Venice and Marseilles, from vantages convenient to the Mediterranean, were the first ports to receive commercially imported coffee from Arabia. The first major cargo of coffee beans was shipped into Venice in 1624, most likely having entered the stream of commerce as part of the spice trade from Constantinople, which included silks, perfumes, dyes, and other exotic items. Around 1650 several Marseilles merchants began bringing coffee home from the Levant. Within a few years, a syndicate of pharmacists and merchants instituted commercial imports from Egypt and were soon followed in this business by their counterparts in Lyon. Coffee use became common in those parts of France. In 1671 a coffeehouse opened in Marseilles near the city market, the success of which prompted many imitators, while private use continued to increase.

The sea lanes charted by the Portuguese were quickly overrun with Dutch fleets, and Portugal and Holland began contesting for supremacy in the sea lanes to the East. By 1700, it was clear that the Dutch were the new masters of this burgeoning oceangoing trade around the world. But the story of caffeine in Europe could not expand further, until this explosion of sea trade in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries was combined with international cultivation to make coffee, tea, and cacao available at a popular price.

As Dutch tea imports grew, far exceeding the value of the coffee imports of their French predecessors, Holland became Europe’s first major caffeine connection. In around 1640 in The Hague, the use of tea began to spread as a fashionable and costly luxury, and the beverage was introduced to Germany from Holland by around 1650 and was regularly traded there, appearing on the price lists of apothecaries by 1657. Tea came to Paris in 1648, where it enjoyed a brief fad, as coffee was to do twenty years later. As Thomas Macaulay was the first to notice in print, “tea went through a phase of extreme fissionability there while it was still hardly known in Britain.”
⁴
Gui Patin (1602–72), a Paris physician and writer, called it
“nouveauté
impertinenté du siècle,”
or “impertinent novelty of the century,” in a letter in which he denounced the recent treatise by Dr. Philibert Morisset,
Ergo Thea Chinesium, Menti Confert
(Paris, 1648), or
Does Chinese Tea Increase Mentality?,
that, having praised tea as a panacea, was so ridiculed by other medical men that no other doctors in Paris took up the defense of tea for many years.
⁵
Despite the admonitions of most physicians, the public entertained a growing appetite for the drink. According to Father Alexander de Rhodes, in 1653 the tea drinkers of Paris were paying high prices for Dutch tea of poor quality:

Cardinal Jules Mazaran (
Lat.
Giulio Mazzarino) (1602–61), a French-Italian cleric and statesman, used tea to relieve his gout. By 1685 tea had become popular among the French literati. Jean Racine (1639–99) grew enamored of tea in his old age, using it as his breakfast drink. As usual in matters pertaining to caffeine, the clergy were leading participants in the literary celebration of the drink. In 1709, the bishop of Avranches, Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), published
Poemata,
which included the Latin elegy
“Thea, elegia”
a fifty-eight-stanza encomium of tea. After explaining that tea was planted by Phoebus Apollo in his “eastern gardens,” and watered by “Aurora’s dew,” he plays on the meaning of the Greek word
“thea”
or “goddess,” and lists the divine gifts that were presented to the young plant. These gifts presaged the marvelous mood-elevating, health-instilling, revitalizing, and intellectually and artistically stimulating powers of the new beverage:

Engraving from Dufour’s 1685 book This two-paneled engraving shows the coffee plant and roasted beans and early Middle Eastern coffee appurtenances. (Department of Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania)