What a pirate nerd came up with to teach Europeans how to drink hot chocolate

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

After William Hughes went ashore, he served as a simple gardener on the estate of Viscountess Conway and had already published his book on vines. However, the meek look was deceiving. His life was full of adventure. In 1672, he published his new book "On the Botany of the New World", in which a very unusual story was discovered, which allowed him to be called a "chocolatier pirate" in the future.

Legalized piracy

He had no intention of becoming a chocolate celebrity and may have never even heard of cocoa. But in the years 1630-1640, William Hughes enlisted in the naval service on a warship. In the text of the botanist's book there was a subtle hint that his service was held on a light ship that had a privateer certificate from the state, giving the right to seize ships of other countries. In fact, it was legalized piracy, but, of course, no one spoke directly about it.

The ship, on which the botanist served, sailed across the Caribbean from Jamaica and Hispaniola to Florida. William Hughes himself was a simple sailor, which meant that he usually got the most thankless and dirty work on the ship. But this had its advantages: he often had to go on a longboat to unfamiliar shores in order to conduct the necessary studies of an unknown coastal zone. There, on the shore, he could completely surrender to his hobby, botany.

Pirate Chocolatier

By the time of William Hughes' sea voyage, Great Britain was already late for the beginning of the development of America's natural resources. The palm in this matter undoubtedly belonged to Spain. Thanks to Christopher Columbus, the Old World and, in particular, Spain, have already managed to get acquainted with the drink, which William Hughes would later call "American nectar".

In general, all of Hughes' botanical research was carried out after the Spanish explorers passed along the same shores. Nevertheless, the Englishman's treatise "On the Botany of the New World" became the first English-language edition, which described in detail the process of growing and producing cocoa. It was this book that became the impetus for the British to develop new world resources.

In the book "On Botany of the New World" the author described his encounters with the native people of America, colonial Europeans and African Americans, and gave a recipe for making hot chocolate. After the book appeared, the British began to treat hot chocolate with less prejudice, and many representatives of high society even decided to try "American nectar", finding it very pleasant and even delicious.

Initially, Europeans refused to taste hot chocolate. Many called the drink similar to blood, and some travelers considered hot chocolate to be more suitable for pigs than for humans. Nevertheless, a little more than a century after Europeans got acquainted with hot chocolate, the drink took its place of honor in the kitchen. In Europe at that time, they even joked about the properties of chocolate, comparing it almost to a drug. At least in some theatrical productions of that time, cases were mentioned when people, having once tasted an intoxicating drink, became its idolaters.

And only good old England refused to recognize nectar from cocoa beans for several decades.

Recipes from William Hughes

It was William Hughes's treatise, which provided recipes for the preparation of a divine drink, that turned the British face to hot chocolate. At the same time, the ingredients for its preparation today may seem very exotic. Variations of the drink could include quite familiar milk, sugar and water, as well as grated bread and eggs, wheat flour and corn, cassava and chili peppers, nutmeg, cloves, zest and citrus oils, cardamom, fennel and many more.

Later historians would call Hughes' work "the act of information possession," and botanical piracy "a backup for the colonial project as a whole." Like all Europeans in the New World, William Hughes extracted resources and knowledge from foreign lands, not interested in the opinions of the people living there. The botanist may have been trying to master American lore, but chocolate and the local traditions that created this drink eventually took over Europe.

The bitter taste of cocoa was reminiscent of the equally bitter events of that time: hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were killed by European weapons, forced labor and disease, thousands of enslaved Africans were sent to American plantations to replace the dead Aborigines. The real authors of Hughes's treatise can be called without exaggeration those who created the drink, which is popular and beloved all over the world today.

Marissa Nicosia, an associate professor of Renaissance literature at the University of Pennsylvania, calls William Hughes a chocolatier pirate. She also recreated an English botanist's hot chocolate recipe for the First Chefs exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library for a celebration honoring the first indigenous and African American culinary celebrities who shaped American cuisine.

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