In?The Queen-Like Closet?(1670),?Hannah Woolley publishes a second recipe, ?To make Chaculato,? that is radically different from her earlier one for chocolate in The Ladies Directory (1662) and from those coming from Spain and the New World.[1] The reconfiguration, I think, indicates the development of English trade systems and colonial ventures in America. This second recipe, much more fully than her first one, amalgamates the local with the global, the English with the Continental, and the European with the New World. It thus modifies the entire recipe for the changing English tastes:
To make Chaculato
Take half a pint of Clarret Wine, boil it a little, then scrape some Chaculato very fine and put into it, and the Yokes of two Eggs, stir them well together over a slow Fire till it be thick, and sweeten it with Sugar according in your taste. (QLC 104)
For this adapted New World drink, Woolley?s recipe begins with French claret wine, into which she grates the American chocolate, adds local English egg yolks, and then sweetens the mixture with Caribbean sugar. Beginning in the sixteenth century, England imported a particular red wine from Bordeaux that the English called claret. In the seventeenth century, however, a new tax law against the importation of French wine had made claret more rarified and expensive, and therefore more desirable.[2] Woolley?s use of this wine in particular indicates that her imagined readership would have the financial means to purchase this preferred beverage, especially as they would also be purchasing the rare ingredient of chocolate.
As in her first recipe, Woolley?s directions call for grating the chocolate, indicating she likely used a hardened chocolate paste already processed in Jamaica. The process consisted of fermenting cacao seeds, roasting and crushing the shells and beans with a roller, and finally winnowing them for separation.[3] The cacao beans or nibs were then ground in a mill and made into a paste, and, according to Willliam Hughes?s The American Phystian (1672), shaped into ?Lumps, Rowls, Cakes, Balls, Lozanges, &c.? This form of preservation was important for it allowed the chocolate to be kept for upwards of a year, thus facilitating easy shipment to England.[4] Furthermore, as with the increased availability of sugar through the colonial practices of the British navy, chocolate also became more readily attainable in England after Cromwell?s forces had defeated the Spanish in 1655 in Jamaica and took over the cacao plantations, where the chocolate was processed.[5]
If in her first recipe the addition of eggs to the Spanish recipe makes chocolate more appealing for the English sensibility, Woolley?s second recipe fully naturalizes chocolate into a specifically English context, essentially making it an ingredient of an already established English drink. Using wine rather than water or milk as the base liquid for her ?chaculato? marks the difference in Woolley?s recipe. In essence, Woolley is taking a familiar English recipe for a posset (a hot curdled wine or ale drink) and modifying it with the addition of the foreign ingredient, chocolate. Perhaps Woolley?s choice to put the chocolate into a posset is due to the fact that, as Kate Colquhoun explains: ?Hot drinks, apart from possets, were a whole new experience.?[6] Her recipe does fit into the category of hot drinks, as Woolley includes in the following pages three traditional recipes for hot possets, each primarily consisting of the same basic ingredients as her one for chocolate: eggs, sugar, and wine (QLC 106?07). Hence, Woolley?s ?To make Chaculato? reveals a chemical process of fusing exotic products into domestic ingredients to make an English drink, and, by application, the cultural assimilation of American substances into the native English body.
Though English recipes had for centuries been incorporating and naturalizing foreign commodities (cinnamon, nutmeg, and saffron, for example), the process and significance of Woolley?s chocolate recipe breaks markedly with this culinary history, specifically because of the rising English colonial engagement with the New World. The fundamental difference is that the English in this context are a colonizing body politic, already engaged in the practice of absorbing some foreign other into the self. The drinking of chocolate mixed into an English posset is the physical, domestic manifestation of colonization that was occurring across the ocean. Further, as the English were expanding imperial dominion over both the environments and bodies that produced chocolate (and sugar) in the seventeenth century, recipes like Woolley?s served not just to incorporate but also to ?preserve? English bodies with American materials and ingredients; both health and taste were increasingly modified through colonial activities enacted in the home by women.
[1] This post is an excerpt from Amy L. Tigner, ?Preserving Nature in Hannah Woolley?s The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet? ? in Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, edited by Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche (Palgrave, 2011), p. 129-49.?Hannah Woolley, The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet (London: R. Lowndes, 1670); ???, The Ladies Directory? (London: T. M. for Peter Dring, 1662).
[2] Thomas Pellechia, The 8,000 Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade? (New York: Thunder?s Mouth Press, 2006), 70, 119-20.
[3] Penelope Jephson?s manuscript cookbook dated from 1671, (V.a. 396) at the Folger library, contains the recipe, ?To make chocolato? that unlike Woolley?s recipe uses cacao nuts in their raw form and gives instructions as to how to process it into a useable paste form.
[4] John A. West, ?A Brief History and Botany of Cacao,? in Chocolate: Food of the Gods, ed. Ales Szogyi (Burnham: Greenwood Press, 1997), 109. William Hughes, The American physitian? (London: J.C. for William Crook, 1672), 116-7.
[5] Sophie and Michael Coe Coe, The True History of Chocolate? (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 167.
[6] Kate Colquhoun, Taste: the Story of Britain Through Its cooking? (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 146.
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