Tea, coffee & chocolate : how we fell in love with caffeine

King, Melanie2015

Books

Find it!
Remove Tea, coffee & chocolate : how we fell in love with caffeine from your current list Save Tea, coffee & chocolate : how we fell in love with caffeine to your current list

Total copies: 1

Availability by location

Place reservation

Summary

A gift book which offers fascinating and comical insight into the roots of today's enduring caffeine culture. It is beautifully illustrated with 18th century satirical cartoons and early advertisements, and offering a perceptive view of social culture in 1650s England. Did you know that coffee was recommended as protection against the bubonic plague in the seventeenth century? Or that tea was believed to make men unfit to do their business and blamed for women becoming unattractive? On the other hand, a cup of chocolate was supposed to have exactly the opposite effect on the drinkers sex life and physical appearance. These three beverages arrived in England in the 1650s from faraway, exotic places: tea from China, coffee from the Middle East and chocolate from Mesoamerica. Physicians, diarists and politicians were quick to comment on their supposed benefits and alleged harmfulness, using newspapers, pamphlets and handbills both to promote and denounce their sudden popularity. Others seized the opportunity to serve the growing appetite for these newly discovered drinks by setting up coffee houses or encouraging one-upmanship in increasingly elaborate tea-drinking rituals. How did the rowdy and often comical initial reception of these drinks form the roots of todays enduring caffeine culture? From the tale of the goatherd whose animals became frisky on coffee berries to a duchess with a goblet of poisoned chocolate, this book, illustrated with eighteenth-century satirical cartoons and early advertisements, tells the extraordinary story of our favourite hot drinks.