350-year-old Iced Chocolate Recipe Recently Discovered

A university lecturer has found some notes that had instructions on how to make a 17th century version of what many of us are crazy about these days, the chilled coffee drink, but in this case, it’s chocolate. Health warnings about drinking too much of the brown confection were even attached to it.

Dr. Kate Loveman, an English lecturer at the University of Leicester, said that the recipe instructed the maker to mix chocolate, some “snow” and some salt and “shake the snow together (for) sometime” in what’s supposedly the first sample of its kind.

She said, “It’s not chocolate ice-cream but more like a very solid and very dark version of the iced chocolate drinks you get in coffee shops today.”

Because of the fact that in those times, freezing food was a pain in the neck, this iced dessert would have been a luxury. Dr. Loveman discovered a myriad of other recipes in a note written by one of the country’s earliest chocoholics, the Earl of Sandwich, in 1668. His great, great grandson is allegedly the one who invented the sandwich. Dr. Loveman has now published a paper on the introduction of chocolate into England.

She said the chocolate became famous first in England by 1640 as an exotic drink made out of cocoa beans. During the 1660s, chocolate typically went hand in hand with advice about safe consumption.

There was even this certain doctor during such time that gave warnings about how the composition of hot chocolate could stir up insomnia, excess mucus, or hemorrhoids.

“People worried iced chocolate in particular was ‘unwholesome’ and could damage the stomach, heart, and lungs. She added, “There were ways around this and the Earl thought the best way to ward off the dangers of eating frozen chocolate was drink some hot chocolate about an hour afterwards.”

To cut it all short, the chocoholics of the modern day didn’t just recently surface. Chocoholics have been around for like forever, or at least ever since the treat was discovered.