Cooking Articles & Recipes

Cooking with Chocolate: Cooking Tips & Delicious Chocolate Recipes

Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes and Home Made Candy Recipes

COCOA AND CHOCOLATE

A French officer who served in the West Indies for a period of fifteen years, during the early part of the last century, wrote, as the result of his personal observations, a treatise on "The Natural History of Chocolate, Being a distinct and Particular Account of the Cacao Tree, its Growth and Culture, and the Preparation, Excellent Properties, and Medicinal Virtues of its Fruit," which received the approbation of the Regent of the Faculty of Medicine at Paris, and which was translated and published in London, in 1730.

After describing the different methods of raising and curing the fruit and preparing it for food (which it is not worth while to reproduce here, as the methods have essentially changed since that time), he goes on to demonstrate, as the result of actual experiment, that chocolate is a substance "very temperate, very nourishing, and of easy digestion; very proper to repair the exhausted spirits and decayed strength; and very suitable to preserve the health and prolong the lives of old men....  "I could produce several instances," he says, "in favor of this excellent nourishment; but I shall content myself with two only, equally certain and decisive, in proof of its goodness.

The first is an experiment of chocolate's being taken for the only nourishment—made by a surgeon's wife of Martinico. She had lost, by a very deplorable accident, her lower jaw, which reduced her to such a condition that she did not know how to subsist. She was not capable of taking anything solid, and not rich enough to live upon jellies and nourishing broths. In this strait she determined to take three dishes of chocolate, prepared after the manner of the country, one in the morning, one at noon, and one at night. There chocolate is nothing else but cocoa kernels dissolved in hot water, with sugar, and seasoned with a bit of cinnamon.

This new way of life succeeded so well that she has lived a long while since, more lively and robust than before this accident.  "I had the second relation from a gentleman of Martinico, and one of my friends not capable of a falsity. He assured me that in his neighborhood an infant of four months old unfortunately lost his nurse, and its parents not being able to put it to another, resolved, through necessity, to feed it with chocolate.

The success was very happy, for the infant came on to a miracle, and was neither less healthy nor less vigorous than those who are brought up by the best nurses.  "Before chocolate was known in Europe, good old wine was 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.

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