Progressively, the European world cottoned on to the luxury of chocolate. It was seen as a divine drink, although not in the literal sense that it had been by the ancient Mayans, who pre-dated the Aztec civilisation. Images on ancient vases show that nobles were buried with a cup of hot chocolate; a nice mug of cocoa before they went to sleep for eternity. Similar etchings indicate how the beans were picked, fermented, dried and then roasted before being ground to a paste. The drink was used in rituals, but it was so highly valued that it was even used as a form of currency. There really was a time when money grew on trees. The conquistadors in 1521 came across beans stored as capital; there were even fake beans, which suggested someone was counterfeiting the currency. Such was their high value that they were treated like real coins. One Spaniard from the time reports seeing natives drop a few beans when they were trading: ‘They got on their hands and knees to pick them up as if an eye had fallen.’
The properties of chocolate were thought to be numerous. Bernardino de Sahagún, a missionary who spent most of his life in Mexico in the years after the conquest, said it could treat fevers and indigestion. You could drink it to cool down or warm up; it could settle the stomach, help you sleep or wake up. Depending on its preparation, its versatility knew no bounds.
But as has been the case throughout history, this is a product produced by the poor and consumed by the rich. That Montezuma drank and served it on such a lavish scale demonstrated his conspicuous consumption at a time when it was valued as currency. According to an account by Hernando de Oviedo y Valdéz, one of Cortés’s men, you could buy a rabbit for four cacao beans, a prostitute for ten and a slave for a hundred.
When Christopher Columbus discovered Mexico in 1503, he also came across cacao beans, but not knowing what to do with them, he carried on in search of ‘real’ gold. So we have Cortés to thank for bringing to Europe one of the most soothing and delicious drinks.
The Spanish should thus be rightly venerated for the proliferation of hot chocolate. A nineteenth-century food encyclopedia reminded its readers of this and Spain’s love of the stuff: ‘The Spaniards are the greatest consumers of cocoa or chocolate in the world and to them it has become so necessary for the support of health and physique that it is considered an extremely severe punishment indeed to withdraw it, even from criminals.’ I think I know the feeling.
To prepare a thick broth called zabaglione
1570
AUTHOR: Bartolomeo Scappi
FROM: Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi: Maestro dell’arte del cucinare
(The Works of Bartolomeo Scappi: Master of the Art of Cooking)
Get six uncooked fresh egg yolks without the whites, six ounces of sweet malmsey [fortified sweet wine], three ounces of sugar, a quarter ounce of ground cinnamon and four ounces of pure water; mix everything together. Put it through a sieve or a colander. Cook in a small kettle with boiling water – that is, get a copper cooking basin – containing enough water that the kettle is sitting in three fingers of it; boil the water until the zabaglione thickens like a thick broth. You can put a little fresh butter with that zabaglione and, instead of the malmsey, a trebbiano from Pistoia or else some other sweet wine. If you do not want the preparation so fumy, use less wine and more water. In Milan that preparation is given to pregnant women. Although it can be made with whites and yolks, you have to put it through a strainer because of the eggs’ tread [sic]. It is served hot.
When the fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici married a similar-aged French teenager, one Henri, Duc d’Orléans, in Marseilles at a service conducted by her uncle, Pope Clement VII, what consequences did the French foresee? Possibly not that as a result of this Italian/French union future generations would enjoy an enhanced tradition of gastronomy embodied in the likes of richly sweet and yellow zabaglione. The foodie consequences of Catherine’s life and her influence on France for generations to come were overshadowed at the time by rather more dramatic happenings. It wasn’t until many years after her death that historians picked through the turmoil in her life to assess her legacy in areas such as pastry and cake baking.
Cruel, frightening and short, Catherine’s childhood was not what most of us today would regard as regular. She may have been born into the rich Medici family of Florence – the wealthiest and most powerful of what was once a city-state – but her parents died when she was just months old and she became a political pawn. First passed to a grandmother, then after the latter’s death a year later, to an aunt, she lived for a time at the family home, the grand Palazzo Medici in Florence. There she was thrown into the usual rounds of court dances and banquets until rampaging Spaniards, and Italian attempts to appease them, put the ten-year-old Medici in danger and led to her being exiled.
The McEwan Collection, National Trust Photographic Library / Derrick E. Witty
Catherine de Medici brought Italian food to France and is widely regarded as the mother of French gastronomy.
She was placed in a convent for her safety until the Pope, her uncle, decided to move her to Rome. There, barely into her teens, she was eyed by Italian nobility as suitable marriage fodder. Foreign royalty cast their eyes over her too, with the winning hand played by the French court. Not showing much potential as a beauty, she was paired with the French king’s second son. Her uncle structured the deal, helping to seal it by marrying the couple himself.
That Henri was also a teenager offered little comfort. His father insisted on watching the consummation and, whatever psychological effects this would have had on the girl, she didn’t manage to conceive for ten years. To compound the misery, her young husband took up with his nanny, Diane de Poitiers, who became his mistress, and in the ensuing years had his ’n’ her double ‘D’s emblazoned on monuments and buildings across the city.
And if Catherine thought marrying the second son might at least ensure a relatively quiet life, any such ideas were quashed when she was thrust into the limelight after her husband’s elder brother died aged eighteen. Soon her husband became king, she queen, and while she failed to produce heirs, her husband was siring several illegitimate children, courtesy of his mistress. Catherine didn’t find much solace with the public either, who rather sniffed at her background. She may have been born of rich bankers but she was not noble by birth. Her detractors called her the Italian ‘grocer’.
Yet she never complained, and was always courteous and charming. She did finally manage to bear children, ten in fact, of which a few survived and, as was the way in those tumultuous times, three became king. Not able to succeed to the throne as a woman, she remained regent. After her husband’s death (he was poked in the eye by a lance during a joust to celebrate the marriage of one of their children), she had his mistress removed from the scene and became the adept, Machiavellian even, power-broker behind the throne. All of which history is important to recount before turning our attention back to zabaglione.
As Catherine’s power grew, so did her influence. She inspired fashions – from thinner waists to higher heels – encouraged the arts, invested in books, erected buildings and added to them, introduced new dancing, tailoring and perfumes. She may not have been a beauty herself – ‘her mouth is too large and her eyes too prominent’ said a contemporary – but she gathered together a glamorous entourage. ‘The court of Catherine de Medici was a veritable paradise and a school for all the chivalry and flower of France,’ recorded one sixteenth-century historian. ‘Ladies shone there like stars in the sky on a fine night.’
And if one wonders how Catherine coped with the apparent isolation of