What was advertised in a colonial newspaper 250 years ago today?

“Choice COCAO TO BE SOLD By William Dennie, at his Store in King-Street.”

Colonial Americans loved stimulating beverages:  coffee, tea, and chocolate.  Each of these products testifies to the ways diets and rituals associated with food and drink evolved as a result of the webs of exchange that crisscrossed the Atlantic World and beyond in the early modern era.

Chocolate has become such a significant part of western culture that most people are not aware of its Mesoamerican origins.  Europeans did not encounter chocolate until they came into contact with the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America, where it had been consumed for at least three thousand years.  Chocolate indeed has a long history, but it’s relatively new to most of the world.

In a fascinating article, Marcy Norton reports that Europeans initially did not care for chocolate, but over time developed a taste for it. [1]  Indeed, many Spaniards worried that in preparing and consuming chocolate according to Aztec methods that they were becoming colonized rather than being the colonizers, that they were being reduced to “savages” rather than “civilizing” the indigenous peoples who were the targets of their conquest.

Over time, however, Europeans learned to love chocolate.  By the 1760s chocolate was affordable to a broad array of colonists, who consumed it at home and in coffeehouses where they gathered to conduct business, discuss politics, and gossip.

In Colonial Williamsburg’s history of “Chocolate in the American Colonies,” Rodney Snyder offers this recipe from The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769):  “Scrape four ounces of chocolate and pour a quart of boiling water upon it; mix it well and sweeten it to your taste; give it a boil and let it stand all night; then mix it again very well; boil it in two minutes, then mix it till it will leave the froth upon the tops of your cups.”

Colonial Williamsburg also offers this history of “hot chocolate,” which includes a greater number of images and features a gallery of coffee and chocolate pots.  You may also enjoy this National Public Radio story about “How Hot Chocolate Became More American Than Apple Pie.”

William Dennie published a no-frills advertisement for “Choice COCAO.”  Perhaps he figured chocolate was so popular that it would sell itself once potential customers knew he stocked it.

[1] Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Meso-american Aesthetics,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 660-691.

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When I featured an advertisement for tea earlier this month I also commented that several modern suppliers market tea by drawing connections to its colonial heritage.  The same goes for chocolate, including American Heritage Historic Chocolate, “artisan chocolate made from a recipe from 1750 & made only from ingredients available in the 18th century.”  They also sponsor events, including a chocolate demonstration at the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia last October.  I wish I could have gone.  Commodities and the history of consumption provide fertile ground for engaging general audiences in learning about the past.  Chocolate was popular in eighteenth-century America and remains popular today, but the methods of procuring, preparing, and consuming it have evolved significantly, presenting wonderful opportunities to examine changes in culture and consumption over time.