CHAPTER VIII 



THE COMPOSITION AND FOOD VALUE OF 

 COCOA AND CHOCOLATE 



Before the Spaniards made themselves Masters of 

 Mexico, no other drink was esteem 'd but that of cocoa ; 

 none caring for wine, notwithstanding the soil produces 

 vines everywhere in great abundance of itself. 



John Ogilvy's America, 1671. 



THE early writers on chocolate generally be- 

 came lyrical when they wrote of its value as a 

 food. Thus in the Natural History of Chocolate, 

 by R. Brookes (1730), we read that an ounce of chocolate 

 contains as much nourishment as a pound of beef, 

 that a woman and a child, and even a councillor, lived 

 on chocolate alone for a long period, and further : 

 ' Before chocolate was known in Europe, good old 

 wine w T as called the milk of old men ; but this title is 

 now applied with greater reason to chocolate, since its 

 use has become so common, that it has been perceived 

 that chocolate is, with respect to them, what milk is 

 to infants." 



A more temperate tone is shown in the following, 

 from A Curious Treatise of the Nature and Quality of 

 Chocolate, by Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, a 

 Spaniard, Physician and Chyrurgion of the city of 

 Ecija, in Andaluzia (printed at the Green Dragon, 

 1685) : 



So great is the number of those persons, who at present 

 do drink of Chocolate, that not only in the West Indies, 

 whence this drink has its original and beginning, but also 

 in Spain, Italy, Flanders, &c., it is very much used, and 

 especially in the Court of the King of Spain ; where the 

 great ladies drink it in a morning before they rise out of 

 their beds, and lately much used in England, as Diet and 



