Cocoa, Coffee, Tea, Chocolate

Background to Cacao, Cocoa and Drinking Chocolate

• 1544 The term cacao entered the Spanish language around the mid-16th century, with a documented mention of cacao beans and a cacao drink being gifted to Philip II of Spain in 1544 by a delegation of Kekchi Mayan people in Mexico. The original Mesoamerican drink (xocoatl) was cold, bitter, and spiced with chilli. First published around 1579 having the meaning "bitter water", it was recorded as "chocolate" in English in 1604. After declaring it to be only "fit for pigs", the Spanish transformed it by serving it hot and adding cane sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon. A guarded secret at the Spanish court, it wasn't till 1615 that Anne of Austria (daughter of King Philip III of Spain) married King Louis XIII of France and brought the Spanish court custom of drinking chocolate at breakfast, to Paris.
• Back to 1555. Coco-nuts (or cocus) in English (referring to the fruit of the coconut palm) was recorded in a translation of a Spanish travel anthology "Decades of the Newe Worlde" by Richard Eden. They had been earlier known in English as "Indian" Beans, or "Great" Beans.
  • So-named because the three depressions on the shell resembled a grinning face, human skull, or bogeyman (coco).
  • 1577-1580. Sir Francis Drake in the West Indies refers to "a kind of fruit called cocos".
  • 1599. Coconut as an individual word has been located by the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1599.
  • 1625. Coconut Tree. The earliest known use of the term "coconut tree" is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1625 in the writings of Dr Layfield.
• 1670 British Jamaica Following the invasion of Jamaica in 1655 (under Oliver Cromwell) Spain ceded the Colony of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid. Under British rule, the island became a hugely profitable possession, producing large quantities of sugar for export.
  • 1689 Sir Hans Sloane a seller of medications in London is said to have popularized drinking chocolate after his visit to Jamaica in 1687.
  • 1707 Cocoa seeds (as a term) was first published in English in Sir Hans Sloane's "A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica". As a new spelling it confused cocoa with coco and cacao. By the 1750s, a Soho grocer named Nicholas Sanders claimed to be selling Sloane's recipe as a medicinal elixir, perhaps making "Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate" the first brand-name milk chocolate drink.
  • 1755 The printers of Samuel Johnson's dictionary ran together the two entries for coco and cacao, after which it has never been undone. Cocoa has been the regular spelling in the UK and Australia, Canada and US ever since.
• 1824 Cadbury Brothers form Cadburys in London, selling tea coffee and drinking chocolate.
• 1842 Cadburys sells French Eating Chocolate.
• 1867 Nestle's (Peter's) Chocolate in Switzerland. First Milk Bar 1875.

Coffee (and Tea) Shops

• 1652 First coffee shop opens in London with coffee "made from the ground and roasted seeds of a tree originally native to Arabia and Abyssinia c. 1600".

  In Dutch "koffie", in Turkish "kahveh", in Arabic "qahwah" a term originally used to describe a type of wine that blunted the appetite. Associated with the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, a home of the plant.

  Tea (also known as Char) was from China. It was seen in Paris in 1636, and the practice of drinking it had been introduced into England by 1644, with wealthy merchants, politicians, and physicians who had ties to Dutch traders secretly drinking it at home. It was kept under literal lock and key in expensive wooden tea caddies.

• 1657 Thomas Garway's Coffeehouse: is recorded as the first in England to sell tea as both a leaf and a hot drink in Exchange Alley, London, primarily to male / business people.
• 1706 Twinings Flagship Store: Thomas Twining acquired Tom's Coffee House on the Strand in London, transforming it into a specialty store where women could openly browse and buy loose-leaf tea.
• 1864 Aerated Bread Company (ABC) Tearoom: The manager in a London bakery started serving food and tea to customers, creating Britain's first commercial public tearoom. Followed in the 1880s by Stuart Cranston in Scotland who established the first dedicated tea room in Glasgow.

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