Karel Černý, head of the Institute of History of Medicine and Foreign Languages of the 1st Faculty of Medicine, drinks green tea in the morning – unlike coffee, it can wake him up. He only indulges in chocolate as a reward because of the sugar. But tea, coffee and chocolate fascinate him so much that he wrote a book about them.
What was Europe without tea, coffee and chocolate?
Before I answer that, let’s talk about what coffee, tea and chocolate have in common. It’s caffeine, a psychedelic alkaloid, and it’s actually the most widely used legal drug because it’s addictive. Europe had no source of caffeine of its own until the advent of tea, coffee and chocolate in the 16th and 17th centuries.
So what was drunk in the time of “pre-coffee and pre-tea”?
In the north of Europe, beer drinking prevailed, in the south, wine was drunk. And in some smaller areas, cider dominated. Alcohol was a part of everyday life, but not everyone could afford it. A large part of the population lived in the countryside, socio-economically on the edge of survival, and therefore drank water. However, this was problematic from the point of view of the impact on health. In the cities, things were not much better with her integrity. There were very few water pipes, so we are mainly talking about the wells behind the house, into which sewage seeped. People sprinkled salt into the water, which disinfected it a bit, but the water was still salty.
And this is also one reason why our ancestors liked soups so much – the water in them was boiled. In addition, even a person with bad teeth, which was almost everyone in the Middle Ages, could eat the thick soup with crumbly bread.
And what did the children drink?
When there was beer, they drank beer. Our ancestors did not realize that alcohol harms children. For them, it was a source of heat, and thus beer and wine were considered very beneficial drinks for strengthening internal heat. According to the ideas of the time, this radiated from the heart, therefore it was the basis of health. For example, the students of the Jesuit gymnasium in Klatovy could not get anything better than warm beer with butter to warm them up while singing at morning mass in a cold church at the beginning of the 18th century. At least from the perspective of the time.
Tea, coffee and chocolate must have directly caused a coup. Who tasted them first?
Coffee comes from Africa, specifically from Ethiopia, from where it reached Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and then further into the world. Tea originates in East Asia, mainly in China and Japan. It was only discovered in India in the 19th century. And chocolate? Today it is cultivated in Africa, for example, but it comes from America. We don’t know which European was the first to enjoy coffee. However, the first mention of it comes from the travelogue of the German doctor Leonhard Rauwolf from the 1680s. Rauwolf describes how in the 1970s he arrived in the Syrian city of Aleppo, then an important trading center, and saw people drinking a hot, inky black drink in the bazaar there. They called him chaube.
And who discovered tea for Europe?
He was the Venetian official Giambattista Ramusio. He himself did not travel, but collected travelogues and published them in three large volumes under the title Navigationand travel. In one of them, he describes that around 1548-1549, a merchant from the east called Chaggi Memet (apparently a transliteration of the name Haji Muhammad) arrived in Venice and brought dried rhubarb from the Chinese border. Ramusio went with his friends to the inn and had a long talk with him. And just at the end of that conversation, the buyer mentioned that the Chinese have a plant called Kijai Katai – ‘tea from China’. He described it as very healthy, against headaches and indigestion. He added that if the Venetians had known this, they would not have wanted rhubarb from him, but this very plant. So this is the very first European mention of tea. Interestingly, Ramusio himself never tasted the tea. Only later missionaries, the Dominicans in China and the Jesuits in Japan, wrote that they actually encountered tea. And even then it was clear how different they were – in China, they drank an infusion of the leaves, while in Japan, they drank powdered matcha tea.
What about chocolate? We’re probably talking about cocoa beans there, right?
Yes, the oldest mention is about cocoa beans and comes from the biography of Christopher Columbus. It was written by Fernando Columbus, the illegitimate son of the famous explorer. Fernando went with him as a teenage boy on the last expedition when the expedition was wrecked. In the biography there is a scene from 1540 when the expedition was running out of food somewhere in the Gulf of Honduras and they saw a native canoe. They captured all who sailed on her and robbed them of their provisions. At the same time, Fernando Colombo mentions the “almonds” that the natives used as currency. This is the earliest European description of cocoa beans. But at that time Europeans did not yet know that a tasty and nutritious drink could be prepared from cocoa beans.
… let alone chocolate as a candy in the form of a table.
No, it didn’t look like today, and it wasn’t a sweet drink either. The point is that until the 19th century, cocoa butter was not removed from chocolate as a fat, which makes the beans so nutritious and which also acts as a binder to hold the chocolate mass together. The procedure was such that the beans were crushed, mixed with other ingredients, left to harden in the cold, and the mass was then shaped into bricks or figurines. It was a semi-finished product from which a drink was brewed. And thanks to the content of cocoa butter, the chocolate foamed during cooking, and this foam was collected as the most prized part in the cups, and only then was the rest of the liquid added. So chocolate was a thick, whipped, hot drink, not a bite-size bar.
When this caffeinated trio started being imported, who was the first to taste it?
Doctors, pharmacists and educated people who were in some relationship with the overseas economy. And right after them the top of society and the nobility. The oldest Czech technical work on these drinks was published in 1720 and its author was Leonhard Ferdinand Meisner, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Prague. Name About the use and overuse of coffee, tea, chocolate and tobacco reveals that the author also dealt with tobacco, which was very popular at the time and spread quickly. Already because it was possible to grow it in Europe – unlike those caffeinated drinks.
And what did the doctors say?
They mostly praised it – they mentioned the effect on digestion and headaches, in the case of coffee, they emphasized the effect on menstrual problems. And already in the 17th century they noticed the stimulating effect. For example, the Jesuit missionary Alexander de Rhodes was so delayed and distracted from his service in the Lord’s vineyard by sleep that he decided to cancel it by drinking tea, as he mentioned in one of his books. That means he intended to stay up at night and function normally during the day. He lasted about a week and then had to accept that one sleepless night a week would have to be enough.
Doctors also discussed the stimulating effect on sexuality. Coffee was claimed to suppress male sexuality, while cocoa and chocolate, respectively, were claimed by contemporary literature to enhance and promote sexual desire. There are no similar mentions of tea.
How did it happen that coffee with tea and chocolate changed from a luxury item to a common everyday pleasure? Was the emergence of cafes and teahouses the turning point?
Not even that. The first cafes – let’s talk only about them, because tea rooms, especially in Central Europe, are a modern thing – appear in the middle of the 17th century. But there was always only one in a given country, usually in the capital. In Prague, for example, the first café was opened at the beginning of the 18th century, and it also remained the only one for a long time.
Cafes represent a turning point in the sense of the birth of a meeting place for the intellectual elite, but it is not the moment when the entire population starts consuming coffee, tea and chocolate. They would have to be cheap, which they certainly weren’t in the 17th century.
So when did those drinks become part of social contact?
In the German-speaking part of Europe, written reports have been preserved from the beginning of the 18th century that coffee is mainly for women – we are talking about women from the rich middle class. The terminus technicus of the coffee nurse was even created for them. These women had coffee tables and coffee services in their homes and gathered to drink coffee and converse. Johann Sebastian Bach even wrote the Coffee Cantata at that time. It’s a comic mini-opera where a father complains that his daughter – and I think his wife – drink too much coffee. He wants to marry off his daughter to get rid of her bad habit, but she declares that she will only marry a suitor who lets her drink coffee.
Cafes, as I mentioned before, were mainly in the capital cities and there were also pharmacies where rich people went to buy coffee, tea and chocolate for home consumption. But it wasn’t until a hundred years later that these drinks began to spread among ordinary people. Now I mean tea and coffee, with chocolate the trend was to drink less and become more and more popular as a sweet. The oldest Czech recipe for chocolate, by the way, dates from the 17th century and is a recipe for chocolate meringues in the sense of bonbons.
Did it taste sweet?
Yes, the middle class began to indulge in coffee at home after lunch or after dinner and to sweeten it, which was associated with a drop in the price of sugar. Sugar was extremely expensive in the Middle Ages. Ordinary people sweetened with honey, but that was not enough either. Sometimes they used crushed fruit, like crushed dried pears. When the fresh fruit was born, they would overeat it, it made them sick, and therefore the doctors thought that the fruit was very unhealthy. It was only when sugar cane from the Caribbean began to be imported into Europe that the urban population began to buy sugar loaves. But sugar was still expensive for rural people. However, it gradually became cheaper until the mass extraction of sugar from sugar beets in the 19th century finally brought down prices. Sugar was great for sweetening coffee and tea – until these two beverages became a very significant source of unhealthy simple sugars.
Can you recall an experience where you connected theory with practice, so to speak?
I remember how in the 1990s, as a student, I bought a very interesting tea in a tea shop – smoked. I was looking forward to cooking it at home, but it tasted very disgusting. It was only when I was preparing the book that I found the description of the German doctor Engelbert Kämpfer, one of the few people who reached the then isolated Japan in the 17th century. He described how ordinary Japanese people prepared tea. First, they hung the poor quality tea in the house above the fireplace to smoke and dry. And then every morning, the first person to get up would pour some into the kettle and make a strong, inedible brew. The others then always poured a little from this teapot and topped up the contents of the mug with hot water. It occurred to me that I accidentally came across just such a tea, which I believe is sold under the name Lapsang Souchong as something that is healthy in quotes. I can still see the twigs that floated in it.
Locket
Doc. M.Sc. Karel Černý, Ph.D. (*1974), head of the Institute of History of Medicine and Foreign Languages of the 1st Faculty of Medicine, studied cultural history at the University of South Bohemia and continued with doctoral studies in the field of history of medicine at the 1st Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University.
In the Institute of the History of Medicine and Foreign Languages, in addition to the history of nutrition and the arrival of tea, coffee and chocolate in Europe, about which he wrote a book From overseas to Bohemia: chocolate, tea and coffee in the early modern period (Academia, 2020), deals with the history of the Jesuit and Dominican orders in relation to medicine and the history of plague epidemics and non-academic medicine in the early modern period.
You could find this article in the magazine Recipe No. 11/25.
Text: Martina Coufalová
