Improving on the Food of the Gods
“I shall from Jamaica give you a better Book, and (I believe) better Chocolata,” boasted Henry Stubbe in 1662.[1]
The scramble for the perfect Chocolate recipe was on! Stubbe was one of a number of Europeans, who thought they could improve on chocolate’s first use by Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec connoisseurs as both currency and “food of the gods. “ From the time of Aztec and Spanish encounters, chocolate figured prominently as one of the region’s better-known aphrodisiacs. And from the Americas, the crop spread to West Africa and other places beyond the Caribbean. But as Stubbe claimed in the seventeenth century, the Jamaican recipe was hard to beat.
In contrast to the preparation of “Chocolata-Royal,” which Stubbe found to be a rather plain concoction mixed with water and following the tastes of the Court of Spain, his English version used milk and eggs or eggyolks to thicken the mixture. Stubbe experimented with making chocolate tea from a paste he made by grinding the beans with sugar, checking repeatedly “as to consistence, colour, and taste.”[2] The “Jamaican” flavors could include vanilla, achiote, and spices, including Jamaican pepper, anise, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. The result, Stubbe claimed was a “Composition [that] seems to have all that perfection…the Ingredients exactly fermenting, and having an excellent scent: and the Taste is neither hot, and biting, nor totally insipid.” Stubbe’s recipe was made “with milde Spices of Jamaica, and such, as may securely be used by the most healthy.” Conveniently,those wishing to prepare chocolate “ in the same place they may be furnish’d with the best Cacao-nuts, which I could yet ever see in London; and also with Jamaica-Pepper.” At the time of Stubbe, he notes that chocolate was “well known to our Seamen, and Land soldiers, in, and about Jamaica, that by the help of the Cacao nut made into paste with Sugar, and dissolved in water, neither having, nor wanting other food, they usually sustain themselves…”[3]
In the century after Stubbe, the reputation of chocolate was well established, but it was not universally consumed. Chocolate production persisted across the Caribbean, where small-scale rural producers continue to grow it and drink it as a hot “tea.” “Wedding chocolate” was a popular drink served at traditional Puerto Rican weddings during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A euphemistic way of asking when a couple was to wed was to ask, “When are you going to offer us hot chocolate?”[4]
In parts of the Caribbean, where cocoa beans were harvested locally, cooks roasted and prepared their own versions of either “chocolate tea” or “cocoa tea.” In the early twentieth century, cocoa beans were sold in the Caribbean in big ninety- or one- hundred-pound sacks and then further marketed in smaller one- or five-pound bags to home cooks. The beans were roasted and their skins carefully removed to avoid burning. As soon as they were cool enough to handle, the beans would be poured out on a wooden board and crushed into a moist paste. Orange peel, cinnamon, nutmeg, and other spices were freshly ground and sifted into the cocoa. Finally the mixture was rolled out into logs and then cut into sticks or balls and allowed to dry. In early twentieth-century British Guyana, women kept sticks in a tin and sometimes marketed their products to guesthouses. An individual cocoa stick would be placed in a cup of hot boiling water, with sugar and evaporated milk added to taste. That was cocoa tea, whereas the hot drink known as chocolate tea was made with cocoa powder.
Another recipe known as “matrimony” was described in Sullivan’s late nineteenth-century cookbook, the earliest printed collection of recipes from Jamaica. It was a mixture of citrus, sugar, nutmeg, sherry, and local fruit creamy in flavor and texture, such as the star apple, to which was later added (after refrigeration) ice and milk. The term as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary was applied more widely as the “mixture of two comestibles or beverages,” suggesting an “injudicious combination” in uses as early as 1813.
Today, thanks to the efforts of scholars and artisans, the culture and tastes of cocoa continue to emanate from the Caribbean. At Casa Cortes Chocobar in Old San Juan, Puerto Rican artisans have revitalized the local cacao industry, by making single destination chocolate and a menu infused with chocolate.[5] Halfway around the world, in Portland Oregon, Woodblock Chocolate collaborates with the Cocoa Research Center at the University of the West Indies campus in St. Augustine, Trinidad.[6] The bean-to-bar enterprise also produces cocoa-tea made from over 2,400 types of cacao and representing the efforts of the International Cocoa Genebank, a living library of cacao (Theobroma cacao). This seems to be the ultimate recipe for securing the future of food for the gods.
[1] Stubbe, Henry, The Indian nectar, or A discourse concerning chocolate; wherein the nature of cacao-nut, and the other ingredients of that composition, is examined, and stated according to the judgement and experience of the Indians, and Spanish writiers, who lived in the Indies, and others…London: printed by J [ames.]. C[ottrell]. For Andrew Crook at the sign of the Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1662).
[2] Stubbe, The Indian nectar, 23-24; 108-.9
[3] Stubbe, The Indian nectar, 31.
[4] Goucher, Candice, Congotay! Congotay! A global History of Caribbean food (M.E.Sharpe/Routledge, 2014), Chapter 5.
[5] Casa Cortes Chocobar, 210 Calle San Francisco, San Juan 00901, Puerto Rico.
[6] Woodblock Chocolate uses a variety of sourced single origin cacao, including from Trinidad (http://www.woodblockchocolate.com).
