The objects of drinking chocolate
Chocolate was a drink for most of its history, and the objects made for it record how it was drunk more reliably than the recipes do. Foam was the point, and almost every tool exists to make foam or to stop the cup being knocked over.
Before chocolate was a bar it was a beverage, and it left behind a distinctive material culture: grinding stones, whisks, gourds, saucers, pots. Those objects are unusually good evidence, because they were made to solve practical problems and the problems can be reconstructed from the solutions.
THE METATE is the Mesoamerican grinding stone — a sloped stone bed worked with a hand stone — on which roasted cacao was ground to a paste. Grinding cacao is hot, slow work, and versions used for chocolate were sometimes heated from beneath to keep the fat fluid.
FOAM WAS THE OBJECT OF THE EXERCISE, and this is the part most often lost. Mesoamerican accounts and the Spanish descriptions that follow them treat the foam as the best part of the drink, not as decoration. The Mesoamerican technique was to pour the liquid from one vessel to another from a height, repeatedly, aerating it as it fell.
THE MOLINILLO — a turned wooden whisk with loose rings, rolled between the palms — was a Spanish colonial invention that produced the same foam by agitation instead. It survives in Mexican kitchens and is still made and sold.
THE JÍCARA is the gourd cup the drink was served in, and it is round-bottomed. It cannot be set down. That single fact explains the object that follows it.
THE MANCERINA is a Spanish saucer with a ring or bracket at its centre to hold the cup steady — attributed to a seventeenth-century viceroy of Peru, the Marquis of Mancera, and named for him. It is a device for drinking chocolate at a social occasion while standing, holding a conversation, and not spilling anything on court dress.
THE CHOCOLATERA, the European chocolate pot, is a tall narrow jug with a lid pierced by a hole. The hole is for the shaft of a stirrer, so the chocolate can be whisked without the lid coming off and without losing heat. Silver and porcelain examples survive in quantity.
- Period
- Pre-Columbian to nineteenth century
- Region
- Mesoamerica, Spain, and Europe
- Kind of record
- Documented history
Significance
The objects track the drink's social history precisely: a pouring technique becomes a whisk, a gourd becomes porcelain on a silver saucer, and a household preparation becomes a court performance.
Why so much equipment for one drink
Cacao is roughly half fat, and that fat does not stay mixed with water. Left alone, chocolate separates.
Every tool here is a response to that. Grinding reduces the particles so the suspension holds longer; whisking re-disperses what has separated and beats in air; the foam is stable because the emulsion is temporarily doing what it will not do at rest. The tall narrow chocolate pot exists because a deep vessel suits a stirrer worked vertically.
Understanding that makes the objects legible as engineering rather than ornament, and it is the same physical problem the modern process solves with conching and an emulsifier.
What the vessels say about who was drinking
The material sequence tracks the social one. A gourd cup is a household object. A silver mancerina with a porcelain cup is a display object, made for a household with servants and visitors, and it appears exactly when chocolate becomes a marker of rank in Spain and then across European courts.
The elaboration is the evidence. Nobody commissions a silver saucer for a drink nobody is watching them consume, and the objects therefore date the moment chocolate stopped being a foodstuff and became a performance more sharply than the written record does.
Related
History and culture
- Cacao among the MayaThe pouring technique the molinillo later replaced, and the vessels it used.
- Mexican drinking chocolateWhere the molinillo is still in everyday use.
- Chocolate at courtThe social setting the mancerina was designed for.
- How Europe learned to drink chocolateHow the preparation changed as the drink moved.
- Making hot chocolateThe same emulsion problem, solved with modern equipment.
Covered in
- Traditional cacao drinksThe molinillo and the pouring technique that produce the foam.
Sources
- The True History of Chocolate — Thames & Hudson(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World — Cornell University Press, 2008(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)