By Daphna Oren-Magidor

“I drink chocolate when my soul is sad to death.”

This statement echoes through time – who among us has not used chocolate as a temporary cure for the blues? –  but it was written in 1687 by Anne Dormer (c. 1648–1695), in a letter to her sister Elizabeth Trumbull.

Dormer had every reason to feel “sad to death.” Her husband was extremely abusive and controlling, her beloved sister had left England to travel with her diplomat husband, and she suffered from insomnia and melancholy. She described her use of medicinals to treat these conditions throughout her correspondence, including multiple mentions of her use of chocolate and its beneficial impact on her health and her mood.

In September 1687 she wrote: “when I have great want of sleepe and no company but a sick maide and a most preverss unreasonable Husband, I then divert myself with my two sweete children, think of all my kind friends and take a dish of chocolate which I find the greatest cordiall and reviveing in the world.” Six months later, in April 1688, she even went as far as claiming that she drank chocolate every day during the winter, which she credited with the substantial improvement in her health.[1]

By the late seventeenth-century, chocolate was fairly well established in England. It had first been introduced around 1640, with efforts made to promote its medical benefits. By 1652 it was possible for a writer to claim (albeit with some exaggeration) that chocolate was “thirsted after by people of all Degrees (especially those of the Female sex) either for the Pleasure therein naturally Residing, to Cure, and divert Diseases.”[2] Initially, chocolate’s medicinal properties were questioned, as it didn’t fit well into the categories of Galenic medicine. By the late seventeenth-century, however, it was often described as a type of panacea.[3]

So it’s not very surprising that Anne Dormer, a gentlewoman with some ties to the Continent (where chocolate consumption had begun earlier), was drinking chocolate on a regular basis in the 1680s. What is more interesting is her juxtaposition of chocolate to another substance which was consumed for both medicine and pleasure: wine.

Wine was considered a standard medical substance in the early modern period, and while it was to be consumed in moderation, it was a part of most diets, certainly for the upper classes, and was also a key ingredient in many medical recipes. Even at the height of Puritan fervor in the mid-seventeenth-century, drunkenness was criticized but the moderate consumption of wine was not seen as moral problem and was taken for granted. Movements calling for complete abstinence from alcohol emerged much later. Yet for Dormer wine appeared to be a risk, and she used it with extreme caution.

Part of Dormer’s concern was the strength of the wine and its impact on her body, which had never properly recovered from childbirth. In the letter from September she noted that she was “weary of sack [cheaper wine from Spain, Portugal, and their Atlantic colonies]”, but she found French wine was “too rakeing for my carcase which grows still leaner.” Dormer rarely drank wine, and when she did the quantity “never exceeds six spoonfulls.” In a later letter she even mentioned that she had “a little dish” for the purpose of measuring drink, which “holds just three spoonfulls which is my usuall dosse”.

Beyond her concern about wine’s physical affects, however, Dormer was preoccupied with wine’s potential for addiction, and perhaps even for moral corruption. While not avoiding wine altogether, she felt wine drinking was risky, especially if done in solitude. “I am sure there is no danger I should ever love wine to sitt and sip by my self,” she wrote, “…w[h]ich is a greate content to my mind, for did I love it, I would never touch a dropp.” She also noted that she consumed her medicinal sherry in the presence of her husband, after dinner, echoing the advice that appeared much later in Benjamin Rush’s exploration of liquor and its effects published in 1790. Rush suggested that wine gave “cheerfulness and strength”, but only when consumed in moderation during mealtimes. Chocolate, on the other hand, was a safe alternative. It gave her “spirits and strength”, which she would never have gotten successfully from wine, since consuming it in any large quantities would have been “a continuall torment to my mind.”

It is unclear why Dormer was concerned about “loving” wine. It’s possible she had previous episodes of drunkenness, as she noted that drinking wine in front of her husband might lead to him almost believing “I may be trusted with it.” Given her husband’s general abusive control of her, however, it’s quite possible that he claimed he couldn’t trust her around wine with no relation to her own actions.  Whatever the reason for her worries about wine, Dormer’s letters offer an interesting example of the everyday use of chocolate as a medication, as well as of the suggestion that chocolate might be a better alternative – morally as well as medically – to the consumption of alcohol.

---

[1] BL Add MS 72516, ff. 163-163v., 167v., 177-177v.

[2] Quoted in Kate Loveman, “The Introduction of Chocolate into England: Retailers, Researchers, and Consumers, 1640–1730,” Journal of Social History 47:1 (2013): 27-46.

[3] Ken Albala, “The Use and Abuse of Chocolate in 17th Century Medical Theory,” Food and Foodways, 15:1-2 (2007): 53-74.

 

---

---