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Draft:The True History of Chocolate

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The True History of Chocolate is a popular history of chocolate by Sophie and Michael D. Coe.

It is a popular history.[1]

Writing

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The True History of Chocolate was written by the husband and wife Michael and Sophie Coe, although originally Sophie was the sole author. She was an established scholar on the cuisine of the pre-Contact Americas. The concept for the book developed out of a paper Sophie presented in 1988 at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery titled "The Maya Chocolate Pot and Its Descendants". Over the following five years, Sophie methodically researched chocolate and cacao's origins, generating thousands of pages of notes.[2] Some of this research involved trips to Europe with Michael's accompaniment as she examined old texts in various libraries.[3] In 1993, Sophie began writing.[3] The following March, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she died two months later.[3]

Before her death, Michael promised he would finish writing the book.[3] Michael was an anthropologist, a reputed professor at Yale on Mayan archeology. Using Sophie's notes, Michael worked to construct a book that would align with her vision. To reflect the quality of the scholarship of the work, Michael named the book after Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of Mexico).[2]

Contents

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The book begins with a discussion of cacao: how and where it grows, its biological makeup, how it is processed and so on. It proceeds to a description of how the Maya and Aztec used cacao as a drink and currency. The Aztec traded cacao, forming intricate trade routes and territorial disputes. Within Aztec society, cacao beverages differed and evolved over time.[2] In this section, the Coes emphasize the origin of cacao in the Americas.[4] Chapters four and five cover European encounters with chocolate; how the settling forces initially took advantage of the value ascribed to cocoa beans by indigenous people,[2] expanding cultivation and trade,[4] but disliked the taste of chocolate, and then introduced the drink to Europe.[2] There, it was primarily drunk by the societal elite for taste and purported medical benefits, and competed with other new beverages of coffee and tea.[4]

The text takes a chapter-long digression into how chocolate and cacao plantations moved to other parts of the world.[2] Here, the Coes suggest chocolate did not become popular outside of Western cultures (except the Philippines) due to cultural conservatism.[4] Chapters seven and eight cover how chocolate gained popular uptake in Europe, and then became mass consumed through technological innovation. An epilogue describes how contemporary society engages with Mayan chocolate making, through tourism and chocolate produced with cacao grown by Maya.[2] As the text concludes, several issues are identified with contemporary chocolate production. These include a lack of attention to quality production in the UK and US compared to Continental Europe and unfair labor practices in developing countries cocoa production.[5]

Over the course of the book, the Coes challenge several then-common understandings of chocolate. They posited chocolate and the domestication of cacao more generally originated earlier than previously thought, among the Olmec people circa 1000 BC.[6] Their evidence was both archeological and linguistic, proposing for the latter that the word "cacao" was originally "kakawa".[7] They challenged understandings of chocolate as exceptionally important to Aztec society.[8]

Reviews

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Writing style:

  • "spell-binding, anecdotal style".[2]
  • "Their remarkable research is presented through the eyes of two very engaging storytellers. Their collection of illustrations, quotations, and vintage recipes makes satisfying reading."[9]
  • "Finely illustrated as well, True Story is a leisurely walk with chocolate along its peculiar history, and just the thing for the chocoholic, food aficionado, culinary historian, or even just the anthropologically curious."[10]

Comparison within the literature:

  • "Coe & Coe's history is among the best available on the subject".[11]
  • "Sophie Coe's work has arguably become the standard by which other books about chocolate, often filled with myths and misconceptions, must now be judged. Peppered as it is with gritty scholarship and fine detail" [10]

Bringing together different fields

  • "I highly recommend this fascinating book for its extensive knowledge of history peppered throughout with fascinating tidbits of anthropology, and its amusing but profound insights into human behavior and culture history as they relate to the ethno/economic botany of Theobroma cacao".[2]
  • "S. Coe & M. Coe's study of chocolate (1996) successfully combines archeology and ethnography."[12]

Research (related)

  • "Invaluable is especially that the authors described for the first time a unified and detailed history of chocolate in a single volume. Moreover, publication contains a number of carefully researched biography and sources, including the codex of Mayans, Aztecs and 16th Century Spanish manuscripts. The text is suitably supplemented by interesting illustrations and it strictly adheres to the time line of the text."[5]

"This book is a work of love, not only the love of chocolate, but primarily the lo history, life, and of a deceased spouse".[11]

The book is an application of Sidney Mintz's study of commodity chains.[13]

The book has been criticised for a shallow coverage of chocolate's relationship with slavery.[14]

"Drawbacks of the Coes' approach include a plethora of detail, some of it unnecessarily dry, and excessive stretches of information unrelieved by humanizing anecdote."[15]

Legacy

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Anderson referred to it as "deservedly famous" in 2008.[1]

"If there is a canon of cocoa works, then it certainly begins with the inestimable volume by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate, second edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), whose impeccable research into cocoa’s Mesoamerican history and European transformations set a high bar for all that followed."[16]

According to academic Carla Martin, the book was "the first book in the contemporary era, in English, that took chocolate as a serious field of study."[3] The publication of The True History of Chocolate has been credited for the ensuing popular and scholarly interest in the origins of chocolate. A decade later, efforts to discover the origins of cacao's domestication were credited to the Coe's book.[17]

It is considered among the most important texts in food studies.[18]

It may also have influenced efforts to by chocolatiers to produce chocolates as they were in Mesoamerican and early modern European times.[17]

With the publication of The True History of Chocolate, the Mexican origins of chocolate were popularly recognised for the first time.[19]

By 2006, emerging evidence was beginning to challenge the theories espoused in The True History of Chocolate.[20]

The book is considered a classic.[21]

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=10917495198213599579&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en]

References

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  1. ^ a b Anderson (2008), p. 71.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Eubanks (2000), pp. 552–553.
  3. ^ a b c d e Smith (2019).
  4. ^ a b c d Švepeš (2015), p. 143.
  5. ^ a b Švepeš (2015), p. 144.
  6. ^ Baghdiantz-McCabe (2015), p. 65.
  7. ^ Powis et al. 2011, p. 8595
  8. ^ Cowling (2021), p. 16.
  9. ^ Hayes (1997).
  10. ^ a b Robertiello (1997).
  11. ^ a b Schmid (1997), p. 610.
  12. ^ Mintz & Du Bois (2002), p. 103.
  13. ^ Hanagan & Nekola (2006), pp. 150, 154.
  14. ^ Hackenesch (2017), pp. 12–13.
  15. ^ Kirkus Reviews (1996)
  16. ^ Leissle (2018), p. 210.
  17. ^ a b Schnepel (2009), p. 94.
  18. ^ Albala (2003), p. 73.
  19. ^ Tibère (2011), p. 67.
  20. ^ Medrich (2006), p. 98.
  21. ^ de Orellana (2012), p. 74.

Sources

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