"The Rake's Ruin at the Gaming Table" circa 1765, an engraving by William Hogarth, depicts the shadowy world of the chocolate house in 18th-century England.
Posted on 08/19/2007 7:00:22 PM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
"A Taste for Chocolate," at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich through Feb. 24, is like a hazelnut truffle - small, but oh-so-rich.
Though the exhibit is only a fraction of the size of the 2003 "Chocolate" show that had visitors salivating at the American Museum of Natural History, it covers the same 2,000-year period in natural and cultural history and does so just as beautifully.
"A Taste for Chocolate" is an excellent example of how you can create the maximum effect with a minimum of materials when you know how to choose and package those objects.
And when those objects are supported with the written word: The handsome accompanying brochure, chock-full of information, is worth more than the $1 the museum is charging.
Kudos, then, to curator Carol Ward, whose father worked for a Brazilian chocolate company; registrar Jack Coyle; designer Anne von Stuelpnagel, and editor Abigail D. Newman.
As that esteemed connoisseur (and persnickety "Peanuts" character) Lucy Van Pelt observes in the exhibit's introduction: "All I really need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt."
Precisely. As we learn, Lucy was evidently joined by botanist Carl Linnaeus, who called the species of cacao tree from which chocolate is derived "Theobroma cacao," which is Greek for "the food of the gods."
The exhibit notes that while food including cacao was cultivated by the Olmec people of Mexico, it was the Classic Period Maya (250-900) who really put chocolate on the map, so to speak. The Maya, who maintained a sophisticated stone culture in Mexico and Central America, blended cacao paste - made from seeds that had been fermented, dried, roasted and ground - with water, chili peppers, cornmeal and other ingredients to create a bitter drink that they used in social and religious rituals. (Attention, Starbucks: The Maya transferred the beverage from one cup to another to top it off with foam.)
It was the Aztec people who called the drink "chocolatl," from the Aztec "cacahuatl" for "bitter water." They believed the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl stole the cacao tree from the other gods. So precious was chocolate to the Aztecs that they used the beans for currency, as an abacus of cacao beans in the show demonstrates. Even the Aztec emperor Montezuma filled his vaults with cacao beans rather than gold.
Not surprisingly, we learn, Christopher Columbus was the first European to encounter chocolate, in 1502. When the conquistador Hernando Cortez returned to Spain with three chests of cacao beans in 1519, he created a fad that was jealously and zealously guarded until Spain's Maria Teresa married her cousin Louis XIV of France in 1660.
Nonetheless, the eternally discerning French were skeptical of the newfangled concoction. But once it was heated, sweetened, mixed with New World flavors and served in exquisite porcelain pots and cups, even the French had to get on board.
Who could blame them? With cheery floral or stately gold-rimmed patterns, the Sevrès and Worcester porcelain sets on display at the Bruce are irresistible. And the elegant chocolate pots, with their spouts in the center and their long handles, give the teapot a run for its money.
If the French were initially reluctant, not so the 17th- and 18th-century British, who added the innovation of milk for a smoother beverage. Soon chocolate houses were popping up all over the country. While these evolved into shadowy men's clubs - as seen in the William Hogarth engraving "The Rake's Ruin at the Gaming Table" (circa 1765) from "A Rake's Progress" - the cozy chocolate-house re-creation in "A Taste for Chocolate" is far more innocent, enabling junior visitors to play at being shop-owners.
Meanwhile, the Dutch were busy applying good old-fashioned know-how to the elixir, using windmills to grind cacao beans and inventing the cocoa press in 1828, which allowed for mass consumption.
Switzerland's Henri Nestlé developed the milk-chocolate candy bar in 1875 while his countryman Rodolphe Lindt invented the conching machine four years later to create a smoother bar.
In the United States, where a chocolate beverage made its first appearance in 1765, Milton S. Hershey became "the Henry Ford of chocolate makers" after discovering chocolate-processing equipment at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
As chocolate has traveled from the New World to the Old and back again, it has taken hold not only on the palate but on the palette.
Some of the loveliest pieces in the exhibit are glass evocations of bonbons and cacao pods that have the tremendous advantage of being noncaloric.
"It's not that chocolates are a substitute for love," chocoholic wit Miranda Ingram notes in the show's introduction. "Love is a substitute for chocolate. Chocolate is, let's face it, more reliable than a man."
"The Rake's Ruin at the Gaming Table" circa 1765, an engraving by William Hogarth, depicts the shadowy world of the chocolate house in 18th-century England.
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