Dunking bizcochos: Sociability and the Material Culture of Chocolate in Eighteenth-Century Spain

ABSTRACT

This article examines the social practices and material culture surrounding the consumption of chocolate in eighteenth-century Spain, through the practice of dipping bizcochos (sponge biscuits). Yet dipping biscuits into chocolate appears ubiquitously in early modern textual and visual sources, this custom has been mostly overlooked by historians. By focusing on the materiality of chocolate consumption, this study offers another example of a more complicated and nuanced story of ‘the civilising process’ and manners in the eighteenth century. An examination of underexplored visual, textual and material evidence allows us to further our understanding of how the introduction of chocolate had a profound impact on Spanish economies, culture and society. Overall, the focus on bizcochos (and dipping) opens a window to explore broader cultural phenomena regarding sociability, table manners, and gender relations in the Spanish Enlightenment.

KEYWORDS:

• Chocolate
• sociability
• material culture
• eighteenth-century: materiality of food

Introduction

A Spanish elite woman drinks hot chocolate from a mancerina (a special saucer with a cup holder) placed on her lap. She seems to dip a bizcocho (long sponge biscuit) into the chocolate cup (Figure 1). Francisco Bayeu y Subías (1734–1795) created this preparatory drawing for a tapestry, known as La visita (The Visit), for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara (Madrid).¹ In the tapestry, a nearly identical female figure foregrounds the scene. In a richly decorated salon, the woman is represented dipping one of the biscuits placed on the saucer, while offering polite greetings to two elegant visitors. This tapestry was finally executed by his brother, Ramón Bayeu y Subías, as part of a collection representing the everyday life of elites in eighteenth-century Madrid. These tapestries usually decorated the very same aristocratic households where these events took place. During visits and tertulias, that is private social gatherings held at the household, the serving of refrescos (refreshments) of chocolate, iced drinks, and small cakes was central.²

Figure 1. Francisco Bayeu y Subías, [Lady with a cup of chocolate], drawing [177-], © Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

Historians have extensively used visual and literary representations of tertulias as evidence of the new forms of elite sociability, and changing gender relations in eighteenth-century Spain.³ A second strand of research has shown the multifarious ways in which the spread of new stimulants, namely tea, coffee, and chocolate, transformed economies and societies in early modern Europe.⁴ The introduction of these beverages not only changed the nature of meals, but also introduced new tastes and forms of sociability in public and private spaces, in accordance with new values of respectability and sobriety. For the Spanish context, historians have stressed the prevalence and cultural significance of chocolate as the main feature of Spanish sociability in the period.⁵ Indeed, chocolate created specific eating rituals and social customs, like refrescos, to the point at which those became symbols of Spanish cultural identity both within and outside the nation. Dipping sponge biscuits into the chocolate became a general habit in Spain, albeit this practice has been largely overlooked by scholars of chocolate, and more generally, of the new stimulant beverages of the early modern period.

This article examines the custom of dipping bizcochos in eighteenth century Spain, which was subject to a set of rules and social conventions. Specifically, it explores the material and performative aspects of chocolate consumption, revealing the crucial role of objects in mediating social practices and eating situations. Chocolate was rarely consumed on its own; instead, it was accompanied by sponge biscuits, and other sweet baked goods; yet these foodstuffs have received very little scholarly attention. Bizcochos (or in Catalan melindros), that is long sponge biscuits enriched with sugar and eggs and baked in the oven, are pervasively associated with chocolate in early modern Spain, in the period when new varieties of enriched biscuits including lady fingers and Savoy biscuits were spreading across Europe.⁶ These pervasive assemblages are evident in Spanish still life paintings, in which bizcochos appear scattered on tables and saucers, or half-dipped into chocolate cups.⁷ A good example is Luis Egidio Meléndez’s Still Life with Chocolate Service from 1770 (Figure 2), where a tall, copper chocolate pot is depicted with its molinillo, a wooden beater for frothing the chocolate, as it was prepared at that time. Herein a Chinese style porcelain jícara (from the náhuatl xicalli),a handless small cup specially used for drinking chocolate, inspired by the Mesoamerican lacquered gourd vessels, sits on a large saucer.⁸ It shares this crowded space with a fluffy bollo (bread roll) and some bizcochos to accompany the hot beverage. Furthermore, bizcochos can be found everywhere in written sources, from farces, cookbooks and medical texts to municipal and guild regulations. Their ubiquitousness, however, strikingly contrasts with their silence in the historiography. Chocolate may have eclipsed its starchy companions, since sponge biscuits have often been absent or marginalised in the history of food.⁹

Figure 2. Luis Egidio Meléndez, Still life with chocolate service, oil canvas, 1770, Museo del Prado, Madrid. ©Museo Nacional del Prado.

This study aims to incorporate bizcochos, and the custom of dipping, into the studies of consumption of chocolate in order to further our understanding of the specificity of the Spanish context in relation to other parts of Europe. Inspired by the important work of Marcy Norton, historians have shown how Spaniards adopted Mesoamerican tastes and technology for the exotic beverage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but replacing some of the original ingredients which were hard to find in Europe.¹⁰ Many scholars have attempted to understand the specific adoption and taste for coffee, tea and chocolate in their respective cultural contexts, which increasingly defined national identities in Europe. These studies make clear that the prevalence and adoption of each of these beverages, depended on a complex combination of political, economic, social and cultural factors. Brian Cowan, among others, has developed these ideas regarding the earlier and extensive introduction of coffee in seventeenth-century Britain. As Cowan argues, the success of coffee in Britain was only made possible by a specific combination of political and social factors that favoured its introduction.¹¹ Similarly, Simon D. Smith and Phil Withington have observed that a change from coffee to tea in the eighteenth century can be partly explained by British imperial interests and fiscal policies, which favoured tea over coffee.¹² As for the Spanish context, chocolate gradually became a more accessible ‘luxury’ food for a broader social spectrum by the second half of the eighteenth century. Irene Fattacciu has shown that a rise in chocolate consumption and availability resulted from the increasing interests of the Spanish Crown in promoting its colonial commodities within its domestic markets.¹³ A series of Bourbon reform policies aimed to stimulate consumption of chocolate and the reorganisation of the Atlantic trade, through the creation of the monopolistic Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas in 1728. As Fattacciu has shown, it was a blend of colonial political interests along with the rise of new social customs that influenced the identification of chocolate with Spain both inside and outside the nation.¹⁴ The real dramatic rise of chocolate consumption came after 1778, with the emergence of free trade policies, which facilitated the decrease in price, making this commodity more accessible across ever-widening segments of the society.

An examination of the particularities of chocolate rituals aims to challenge and expand the existing narratives of polite sociability, and the consumption of luxury exotic drinks, which have been mostly based on northern European paradigms and contexts.¹⁵ While the Enlightenment has been mainly associated with ‘civilised’ manners, and refined artefacts, this case study shows that people still relied on the fingers in chocolate-drinking rituals. The habit of dipping into chocolate, therefore, problematises one of the main elements in Norbert Elias' ‘civilising process’, where civilised manners and finger-food eating were presented as mutually exclusive.¹⁶ By focusing on the materiality and practices around chocolate drinking (and dipping), this study gives us a further example of a more complicated and nuanced story of table manners, civility and modernity in the early modern period. This study combines and confronts underexplored and newly discovered images, historical objects and documents with methods from different fields, ranging from material culture, history of food, cultural history, and social history. In recent years, historians of the material culture of food have increasingly incorporated non-textual sources in their historical analysis to further explore lived experiences and practices, yet stressing their inherent limitations.¹⁷ These studies have emphasised the need to interweave visual, material, and written sources to uncover the ephemeral past of cooking and eating for a nuanced history of food.

This article first examines chocolate rituals (refrescos) and the habit of having chocolate and sponge biscuits as a peculiarity of Spanish cultural identity. As this study argues, this new custom created eating rituals involving the use of specialised vessels and foodstuffs, which were key in the construction of social identities in eighteenth-century Spain. While previous studies have mostly relied on literary accounts, this article explores a broad range of sources, from cookbooks and family account books, to guild records. In so doing, it looks beyond cultural representations in order to reveal the ‘real’ social and economic effects of these consumption habits in major cities such as Madrid and Barcelona. An analysis of the changing guild regulations and conflicts shows an ever-increasing interest in these foodstuffs among food retailers, especially confectioners who dominated the retail market in sugar, confectionery and other sweet goods.¹⁸ The second section explores the material culture of chocolate in order to reconsider the uses and purposes of specific chocolate wares, namely mancerinas, that is, saucers specifically designed to hold the handle-less chocolate cups. Unlike previous works, a close analysis of visual representations and historical objects illustrates how consumption practices might have shaped the form and popularity of the macerinas. In addition, using a material culture approach, it considers how these artefacts acted as social agents, by mediating the interactions between food, the body and the space in these social rituals, while expressing the new values of civility, refinement, taste and pleasure.¹⁹

Building on the previous section, the final part contrasts and compares treatises of manners, personal diaries and images to consider the performative aspects of dipping. It argues that dipping sponge biscuits in chocolate might not be completely opposed to the codes of appropriate behaviour expected from an educated elite. Rather, this action provided an opportunity to display dextrous bodily control, and refined manners, which were central to the culture of politeness in the Enlightenment. An analysis of the food, the vessels in which chocolate was served and, in turn, the bodily movement associated with them, reminds us of the challenges arising from their consumption, given that the partakers had to carefully dip and sip without splashing the liquid over. Navigating these social spaces required a codified and skilled use of fingers and mouths, while relying on the material qualities of food and artefacts in the observance of codes of civility. Overall, the focus on dipping into chocolate gives us an accessible way to explore broader cultural phenomena, while allowing us to incorporate other geographies and realities in the main historical accounts of ‘polite’ sociability and eating in Europe. Such a comprehensive approach, combining the socio-economic, the cultural and the material, helps further our understanding of the significance of food and drinks in the Spanish Enlightenment.

Having a refresco

Having refreshments of chocolate and sweet baked goods, namely refrescos, became a far-flung phenomenon with social, cultural and economic effects in the major Spanish cities in the eighteenth century. Although refrescos shared some similarities with polite rituals linked to the consumption of coffee and tea in other European countries, refrescos were considered as genuinely Spanish, thus becoming symbols of cultural and national identity. Contemporary locals and foreigners alike stressed that consumption of chocolate was much higher than that of coffee, and tea, unlike in other European countries. In 1789, Antonio Lavedán, the main surgeon to the Spanish army and the royal family, acknowledged that ‘the use of tea in Spain is not as widespread as in England, Holland and the East Indies’.²⁰ Similarly, British travellers such as Elizabeth Vassall-Fox, better known as Lady Holland (1771–1845), pointed out that ‘Spaniards are as eager to consume chocolate in the morning and evenings as the English are with tea’.²¹

Contemporary visual culture and literary sources illustrate how refreshments of chocolate and sponge biscuits were strictly codified according to a specific ceremonial. In the eighteenth-century ceramic tile panel known as Cocina Valenciana (Valencian Kitchen), a noblewoman, attended by her enslaved Black maid, supervises the preparation of a refresco of various courses: a first course of ice-creams and aguas garrapiñadas (a flavoured and sugared frozen granita) along with sponge biscuits and small cakes. After that, there is a second course of hot chocolate together with more sweet baked goods. Finally, glasses of fresh water are served to finish (Figure 3). Such scenes became popular iconographical elements in wall decorations of aristocratic households in Valencia aimed at displaying the hosts' wealth, social distinction and refinement in the very same space where these events were held.²²

Figure 3. [Housewife supervising a refresco], ceramic tile wall panel, ca. 1786–1790, Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid.

As represented in this panel, women played a leading role in organising these social events, in accordance with the etiquette and latest trends in polite hospitality. The need to follow this ceremonial is highlighted in the treatise El ceremonial de estrados, y crítica de visitas (The Ceremonial of estrados and Critique of Visits), published in 1789, whose anonymous author complained that ‘the rules of courtesy and etiquette have been very much forgotten in Madrid’.²³ With a satirical tone, the author offered some guidelines to the elite hostesses who, when receiving their female friends at home, ‘do not want to look as if uneducated’ in front of them.²⁴ On the other hand, moralists and intellectuals fiercely criticised the extreme artificiality and lavish expenditure on refrescos, considering these events as a locus for economic and moral harm to the household. The Spanish journalist José Clavijo y Fajardo, for instance, ridiculed the ‘excessive ceremony’ of what he called the ‘puerilidad de nuestra nación’ (‘this puerility of our nation’).²⁵

The elaborate ritual of refrescos was also described in cookbooks such as the 1747 Arte de Repostería (The Art of Confectionery), by Juan de la Mata, a confectioner in Madrid. The book is dedicated to Don Rodolfo Acquaviva y Aragón, Duke of Atri, which may suggest that the confectioner worked in an aristocratic household. Republished several times in that century, this influential confectionery book was aimed at elite stewards, and amateurs.²⁶ Juan de la Mata probably copied and adapted substantial parts of the French François Massialot’s La nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits, although some parts are original, namely the chapter on refrescos.²⁷ A new and original chapter on the serving of refresco, including a series of engravings of table settings, had been absent in the French counterpart.²⁸ In addition, the book offers a myriad of recipes for those food novelties served during these light meals, like frozen granita, ice-creams, lemonade, and horchata, a refreshing drink made with melon seeds and almonds, and up to thirty recipes for bizcochos, of various shapes, flavours, and textures. Interestingly, Juan de la Mata also changed the chapter on the preparation of tea, coffee and chocolate. While Massialot offered detailed instructions to prepare chocolate, Juan de la Mata omitted this explanation claiming that ‘no one is ignorant of the preparation of chocolate’ and ‘there is no place or household, even those of the villagers, that do not know it’, assuming that the reader would be already familiar with this.²⁹ Juan de la Mata’s adaptations in this chapter indicate the extensive degree of chocolate consumption by the 1750s, to the detriment of lesser known hot beverages, such as coffee and tea.

As a result of their growing relevance, refrescos were the subject of medical debate. Most medical authorities lavished chocolate with salutary virtues and encouraged its consumption at breakfast, accompanied by toasts or biscuits and a glass of fresh water. They, however, frowned on its consumption at other times of the day, especially in the afternoon and evening.³⁰ Juan Bautista Juanini (1632–1691), royal surgeon to Charles II of Spain and one of the first novatores, advised avoiding meriendas (afternoon snacks) and refrescos, arguing that they were the main causes of indigestion among the inhabitants in Madrid.³¹ In a similar vein, in his Tratado de los usos, abusos, propiedades y virtudes del tabaco, café, té y chocolate (Treatise on the Uses, Abuses, Properties and Virtues of Tobacco, Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate), Antonio Lavedán condemned drinking chocolate in the afternoon and evening because it causes severe indigestion, especially when consumed along with food, as in the case of refrescos.³² The increasing accounts on refrescos in a range of publications, from journalistic and culinary to medical writings, could be seen as a sign of an ever-wider popularity of chocolate across Spanish society in the eighteenth century.

This established custom had inevitably important economic effects in local markets. The period witnessed the emergence of endless varieties of sweet baked goods specifically made to accompany this beverage. For instance, a bollo (bread roll), as the one represented in Meléndez’s painting (Figure 2), was described as ‘a sponge bread roll, made of flour, milk, eggs, sugar and butter, used for consuming chocolate’.³³ Similarly, an eighteenth-century manuscript book of sermons from a Dominican convent in Barcelona contains a handwritten recipe entitled Modo de hacer roscones para tomar chocolate (Manner of making ring-shaped sweet pastries to have with chocolate).³⁴ Prior to the introduction of chocolate, these baked goods were usually consumed along with wine as snacks and desserts, yet it was the new custom of drinking chocolate that fostered a dramatic expansion of sweet baked goods in local markets.³⁵ In Madrid, for instance, the baker Juan Colomer obtained a licence in 1689 to sell bizcochos and panecillos, or bread rolls made of eggs, sugar, butter and scented waters, near la Puerta de Alcalá, arguing that ‘these are very beneficial items to have with or without chocolate’.³⁶

By the turn of the eighteenth century, sponge biscuits came to be at the heart of guild competition, as a growing number of bakers encroached on the confectioners’ privileges on the sale of bizcochos.³⁷ Known as bolleros in Madrid and forners de pastas finas in Barcelona, these new bakers specialised in making enriched biscuits and other small cakes to meet the growing demands, thus jeopardising confectioners’ ambitions to control the sponge biscuit business.³⁸ With the economic reform policies of Bourbon absolutism in the second half of the eighteenth century, these emerging food traders were granted licences much more easily than in previous decades to sell their sweet baked goods, in opposition to guild monopolies. For instance, in Barcelona, Onofre Trinxet, a well-established baker located in the Convent dels Àngels, near La Rambla, obtained a royal privilege to produce and sell sweet baked goods in the city.³⁹ A number of receipts and account books have revealed that Trinxet was one of the main provisioners of sweet baked goods of the principal political institutions and noble families of the city. Many of these documents record substantial purchases of sweet baked goods specifically made to be eaten with chocolate, including 'pastas para chocolate’ (pastries for having with chocolate), ‘coca para el chocolate’ (flat-cake for having with chocolate) and ‘roscas para el chocolate’ (ring-shaped pastries for having with chocolate).⁴⁰ Similarly, Onofre Trinxet regularly sold their sweet baked goods to the City Hall on Corpus Christi, one of the main religious holidays in the city. At those institutional soirées, municipal authorities followed the triad of granita, chocolate and sponge biscuits, as evidenced in their accounts.⁴¹ Furthermore, a broader social spectrum began to indulge in these sweet treats on special occasions. In Barcelona, the new status of guild masters was celebrated with these sweet refreshments among the more privileged guilds such as grocer-confectioners, silversmiths or stained-glass window painters, as well as among those of lower status such as shoemakers.⁴² Moreover, holidays in monasteries, university graduations and artisan confraternities’ feasts were all celebrated with similar sweet snacks.

As a result of these growing demands, confectioners strove to control the retail market in sponge biscuits, by adapting their regulations to the new circumstances. In Barcelona, in 1744 a new regulation of grocer-confectioners stipulated a specific recipe for melindros (sponge biscuits), that was to be followed by all master confectioners.⁴³ According to this document, this new regulation aimed to fight off the growing competition from bakers in this flourishing business.⁴⁴ In 1766, Madrid, confectioners also limited the production of bizcochos and cakes to guild members.⁴⁵ Later on, in order to meet consumer demand and ensure high-quality food products, their ordinances carefully dictated ‘how to make bread rolls and cakes to have with chocolate’ which were to be made of beaten eggs, sugar, milk, butter and flour and baked in the oven.⁴⁶ The tireless, yet unsuccessful, attempts of confectioners to control the production and sale of sponge biscuits were not only a symptom of the emerging decline of guild monopolies, but also of the changing trends in consumer practices and tastes.

Material culture

Opening one’s home to visitors created new forms of sociability and transformed the household itself; hosts acquired new furniture, decorative items, and tableware, as a way of embodying their luxury, refinement and taste. The spread of new stimulants, namely tea, coffee, and chocolate, consumed at home created new demands for specialised tableware, and other luxury commodities, in emerging consumer societies across Europe.⁴⁷ Fine ceramic vessels to drink these hot beverages were highly valued for their aesthetic qualities, exotic origin and functionality, namely their resistance to high temperatures.

The proliferation of vessels for the serving and drinking of chocolate, coffee and tea has been used as evidence of the spread of these drinks in diverse contexts and social groups, underpinned by probate inventories.⁴⁸ In eighteenth-century Spain, a craze for chocolate prompted a growing demand for chocolate ware, such as chocolate pots, jícaras (chocolate cups) and mancerinas (chocolate cup holders). Probate inventories from Madrid and Barcelona recorded a much higher number of chocolate pots than coffee pots, and even fewer teapots, revealing a more significant consumption of chocolate than coffee and tea.⁴⁹ Studies based on probate inventories have confirmed that, by the turn of the eighteenth century, chocolate ware was listed in greater quantities among commercial and upwardly-mobile social groups such as merchants, liberal professionals, and master artisans.⁵⁰ Over the course of the century, the use of utensils for the preparation and consumption of chocolate continued and increased in all social groups, followed by a rise in coffee ware, especially in the last years of the eighteenth century. Tea, however, still remained marginal or absent in these records.

One of the main centres of production of tin-glazed earthenware chocolate vessels was the Royal Earthenware Factory of Alcora (Castelló), founded by the ninth count of Aranda in 1727.⁵¹ Scholars have reiterated that the mancerina is presumed to have been invented by the Marquis of Mancera, viceroy of Peru (1639–1648), after an incident in his palace where a lady tipped and spilled chocolate over her dress.⁵² Whether this tale is apocryphal or not, these artefacts help avoid the chocolate cup rattling inside the saucer and spilling the chocolate, while providing a safe holder to set the boiling cup down.⁵³ However, visual representations of these vessels confirm that they might have been strategically designed to accommodate bodily practices regarding chocolate-drinking (and dipping). An eighteenth-century Valencian ceramic tile panel (Figure 4) depicts a woman holding a Bérain style mancerina, in which some oval-shape biscuits are placed on the saucer, ready to be dipped into the chocolate cup.⁵⁴ As this image suggests, these vessels would provide enough surface area for sponge biscuits and other small treats, thus conforming to the Spanish custom of having chocolate along with sponge biscuits.⁵⁵ The Alcora factory produced circular mancerinas inspired by Chinese and European white-and-blue motifs, such as those represented in the tile panel, as well as more creative items in the form of doves, leaves or shells (Figure 5). These luxury vessels were only used by the elites at first, yet some potters produced more affordable items made of less precious materials, like majolica, making these objects more widely accessible.⁵⁶

Figure 4. [Chocolate maid], ceramic tile wall panel, ca. 1750–1800, MCB 100,436. © Museu del Disseny de Barcelona.

Figure 5. Mancerina, earthenware, Real Fábrica de Loza fina y porcelana de Alcora, ca. 1727–1750 © Museo Nacional de Cerámica y Artes Suntuarias González Martí, Valencia.

Further evidence on this particular use of mancerinas is the drawing L’hora de la xocolata (The Chocolate Hour), attributed to Antoni Casanovas Torrents (1752–1796).⁵⁷ The image vividly illustrates the emergence of new forms of mixed sociability in refurnished domestic spaces. Here two richly dressed women with high wigs, are sitting with a man on a French-style canapé, or upholstered sofa, while they are drinking and dipping biscuits in chocolate from mancerinas (Figure 6).⁵⁸ As seen in this image, the new French-style canapé replaced the estrado, a low platform covered with cushions, specifically made for women’s leisure and socialising, and which was a symbol of the segregation of the sexes in seventeenth-century households.⁵⁹ Eighteenth-century sofas, instead, encouraged relaxed poses, as well as physical proximity and closer interactions between men and women during tertulias.⁶⁰ The relaxed atmosphere of refrescos and tertulias was observed by many foreign travellers, for example Joseph Townsend and Jean François de Bourgoing, among others.⁶¹ In 1803, Lady Holland observed that ‘people sit or stand with no ceremonies’, and ‘enjoy of great freedom’ during a refresco that she attended in Valencia.⁶²

Figure 6. Antoni Casanovas Torrents, L’hora de la xocolata, ca. 1770, ©Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.

The Chocolate Hour invites us to further consider the crucial role of objects in accommodating bodily practices in these new social spaces. It gives us clear evidence of how mancerinas would hold sponge biscuits when dipping, and how they also provided a safe holder in which to set the handless jícara back on the saucer between sips, especially when there were no tables to hand. The specific uses of mancerinas in the social and spatial contexts of refrescos become even more evident when compared to other hot beverages, especially coffee. In Spain, the adoption of coffee, even later and slower than in other European countries, created different material culture, spaces and rituals of consumption. In the second half of the eighteenth century, coffee was gradually introduced as a popular alternative and competitor to chocolate, especially among those who embraced French fashions and tastes. Along with chocolate and other fashionable beverages, coffee was consumed in public coffeehouses in the main commercial cities, such as Madrid, Barcelona and Cádiz by the last decades of the century.⁶³ At home, the nobility and high bourgeoisie began to consume it to ease digestion after large meals, usually in a separate room. Coffee was served sweetened with sugar, and occasionally taken with milk. Therefore, coffee services included sugar bowls, milk jugs, and teaspoons to stir sugar. However, none of these items were part of chocolate services as sugar was added earlier during its preparation and no milk was added. In addition, handled coffee and teacups contrasted to handless jícaras, which maintained a similar shape of the Mesoamerican lacquered gourds. Although it is not clear whether jícaras might have been used for coffee as well, objects associated with these beverages reflect codified and differentiated uses, spaces and times of consumption specific to each of these beverages, which responded to their cultural meanings rather than a dietary rationale.⁶⁴ Chocolate was consumed in informal meals where people sat, chatted and moved around the room. Mancerinas would allow them to hold the chocolate cup in one hand and keep the other free to take some of the biscuits that servants passed around, ready to be eaten, but also, to be dipped.

The pleasures of dipping

In 1794, Rafael d’Amat i de Cortada, a member of the Catalan middle nobility known as the Baron of Maldà (1746–1819), attended a refresco in the Torre d’en Peixau near Barcelona. As an authentic gourmand and ‘chocolate lover’, he carefully recorded the meals and social events he attended in his personal diary entitled Calaix de Sastre (Tailor’s Chest) between 1769–1814.⁶⁵ For that occasion, the refresco consisted of frozen milk, lemonade, orangeade, chocolate and sponge biscuits, bread rolls, and ensiamades ‘to be dipped into chocolate cups’.⁶⁶ Maldà’s autobiographical accounts provide unique insights into the lived experiences which can rarely be found in other written sources: among others, his several references to biscuit-dipping during evening soirées and breakfasts.

Maldà’s accounts on dipping bizcochos, which involved a heavy reliance on fingers, may challenge Norbert Elias’ views on the ‘civilising process’. Elias argues that across early modern Europe an increasing reliance on cutlery, especially the fork, encouraged stricter bodily self-control and a growing distance between food and the body.⁶⁷ However, European conduct manuals and etiquette treatises, which were Elias’ main sources, give no mention of biscuit-dipping.⁶⁸ This silence in normative texts stands in striking contrast with the well-established practice of dipping starchy food into beverages in the early modern period. Dipping crispy rolled wafers into sweet wines might have been a widespread custom at the end of meals.⁶⁹ Wafers were rolled into long cylinders so they would fit into wine glasses. In early modern England, people dipped small ‘toasting biscuits’ into sweet wines after drinking a toast.⁷⁰ Shortbreads, hard biscotti and mostaccioli (small spiced biscuits) were usually dipped into dessert wines in Renaissance Italy.⁷¹

By absorbing the liquid through dipping, the hard texture of starchy sweets is softened and their sweet flavour is enhanced, making them tastier at the same time. In addition, hard biscuits such as ship’s biscuits and rusks, were usually soaked in wine so as to moisten them in a period when poor dental health was common across the social spectrum. Bioarchaeological evidence attests that poor oral hygiene and a change of diet, namely an increased intake of sugar and refined wheat flour, would have led to growing dental decay across Europe from the seventeenth century.⁷² Not surprisingly, the Baron of Maldà particularly valued the softness of all these sweet baked goods, mentioning dipping delicada coca, ben tova (‘delicate and very soft flat cake’) into chocolate and bescuit tou (soft biscuit), while acknowledging having very ‘bad teeth’.⁷³

What seems to be clear is that eating with one’s fingers would not have been prohibited; instead; it might have been strictly codified. A clear example is Antoine de Courtin’s influential book Nouveau traité de la civilité (1671), translated in Spanish as La urbanidad y cortesía universal que se practica entre las personas de distinción (The Urbanity and Universal Courtesy Performed by People of Distinction).⁷⁴ Most eighteenth-century Spanish treatises on manners were translations and adaptations of foreign works, in particular French.⁷⁵ Like many of his contemporaries, Antoine de Courtin pointed out that dipping bread into sauce was formerly permitted, but that ‘nowadays that would be a kind of rusticity’.⁷⁶ The author carefully explained why the fork must be used instead of eating with one’s hands as follows:

It is very impolite to touch anything greasy, a sauce or a syrup, etc. with your fingers, apart from the fact that it obliges you to commit two or three more improper acts. One is to wipe your hand frequently on your serviette and to soil it like a kitchen cloth, so that those who see you wipe your mouth with it feel nauseated. Another is to wipe your fingers on your bread, which again is very improper. The third is to lick them, which is the height of impropriety.⁷⁷

Interestingly, the author asserts that walnuts, dried fruits and dry confections can be eaten with the hands.⁷⁸ In a similar vein, Juan de Lagunas’ Documentos de buena crianza (Documents of Good Breeding) (1658) stated that ‘bread, meat and any fruit can be taken with two or three fingers, but never with five fingers, because that is coarse’.⁷⁹ Later, the 1767 Spanish translation of Jean-Baptiste La Salle’s Les règles de la bienséance et de la civilité chrétienne (The Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility) instructed the reader that small pieces of bread must be ‘raised to your mouth by hand and held by the thumb and the second finger’.⁸⁰

Rather than forbidden, eating with the fingers was carefully codified and limited to specific foodstuffs with certain material qualities which allow one to keep one’s hands clean. It is not surprising that similar reasoning might be applied to bizcochos. Sponge biscuits were conveniently long so they could fit into cups, and prevent direct mouth and hand contact when dipping, thus ensuring one’s hands could be kept clean. Juan de la Mata’s confectionery book indicates that granita must be served with vizcochos largos para las bebidas (long biscuits for drinks).⁸¹ Similarly, the Baron of Maldà mentioned several varieties of biscuits and small cakes that were given per sucar, meaning ‘to dip’.⁸² Many of them are characterised by their long thin form, such as ditets (small fingers), and sabatilles (slippers), a sweet oval pastry named after a light and very thin woman’s shoe in this time period.⁸³ The Baron of Maldà also recorded eating sliced bread in the form of melindros per sucar (sponge biscuits for dipping) with chocolate.⁸⁴ Their long form and individual size would be particularly convenient for dipping without causing disgust to the rest of the diners.

In this regard, the texture of these sweet baked goods may have been pivotal to ensure safe dipping into hot liquids. If the biscuit dough is soaked in excess, it crumbles, collapses and splashes the liquid, thus triggering several etiquette offences. The physician Len Fisher asserts that doughnuts and other pastries are more suitable than biscuits for dipping into hot beverages.⁸⁵ In his account of the ‘physics of dunking’, Fisher argues that dry biscuits are very porous, and when they are dipped into hot beverages, the hot liquid rapidly softens the dry starch grains of the biscuit, which becomes so soft that it collapses. By contrast, the ‘elastic net of protein gluten’ of doughnuts and enriched breads makes it more difficult for them to swell and dissolve when absorbing the liquid.⁸⁶ Early modern sponge biscuits might fit into the same description, as they were characterised by their sponginess. Early modern recipes for bizcochos stress the importance of obtaining the right texture by whisking eggs vigorously, usually until they became white and frothy.⁸⁷ The significance of beating eggs lies in the fact that whisked eggs act as a raising agent, which helps to make biscuits moister and lighter. Some early modern recipes for bizcochos recommend warming the bowl with a gentle heat when beating the batter, because the warm temperature facilitates increased rising of the dough when baking.⁸⁸ At the same time, the vigorous whisking of eggs helps the batter rise when it is being baked, resulting in a spongier, yet firm, texture.⁸⁹ Thus, these sweet baked goods were not only created to be eaten with chocolate, but also to be held and dipped without breaching etiquette, while enhancing the multisensory experience of eating.

Consider now the sequence of gestures involved in dipping as represented in The Chocolate Hour (see Figure 6): the biscuit must be dipped neatly to reach one’s mouth without dripping in a smooth movement. Individuals were seated very close to each other, which makes dipping even more hazardous: a sudden unexpected gesture could lead to spilled chocolate, burns and stained clothes.⁹⁰ Balancing these objects and foods, therefore, involves a specific art, especially when seated with no side tables. Despite these physical challenges, individuals in visual representations of refrescos maintain a very relaxed, even graceful, position. Scholars on decorative arts, such as Mimi Hellman and Sarah Richards, have persuasively shown how luxury objects conveyed social and cultural meanings not only through their possession, but also through their usage and performance.⁹¹ As Sarah Richards notes, ‘it was not enough to display refinement in clothes and consumer goods, the body was on display and was required to conduct itself within seamless grace and delicacy, whether female or male’.⁹² While Hellman and Richards focus on the polite rituals in France and Britain respectively, a similar observation can be made in relation to Spanish refrescos. Indeed, chocolate rituals required ‘civilised’ manners and the skilled use of objects since the body and clothing were constantly exposed to contingent, hazardous damage. In other words, these social events required a series of ‘techniques of the body’ on the part of consumers; the fingers and mouth must be properly trained to dip into chocolate cups with elegance and ease.⁹³

Conclusion

From the ceremony of serving to eating, a refresco was a performance where multiple social actors, human and non-human, were in play. Chocolate consumers had to rely on their adroitness of gesture, as well as on the material qualities of food and objects. Sponge biscuits and mancerinas helped individuals navigate the new spaces and rituals of polite hospitality with gracefulness and civility, while enhancing the sensuality of this multisensorial experience. Having chocolate with bizcochos, which was subject to a set of rules, became an important defining trait and fundamental component of the cultural and national identity of eighteenth-century Spanish society, with extensive implications and effects. Sponge biscuits appeared pervasively in cookbooks, personal bills and accounts, guild records and wall decorations revealing a wide-ranging social, economic and cultural significance of these small starchy treats. The influence of these eating practices manifested in colonial and local economies, fostering the emergence of new regulations and business for tableware, fashionable drinks and food in response to changing consumer tastes. Thus, bizcochos remind us of the need to explore the complexities behind the main narratives of polite sociability and eating in different cultural and geographical contexts of the Enlightenment.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Melissa Calaresu, Rebecca Earle, Caroline Goodson, Ulinka Rublack, and Laia Portet i Codina, as well as the two anonymous readers for this journal for their comments and suggestions. Versions of this article have been presented at the Material Histories Cluster Meeting in Cambridge in 2023, and at the 2nd EUI Conference in Visual and Material Culture Studies in May 2021; I would like to thank all the attendees for their comments and queries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union “Next Generation EU”/PRTR [RYC2021‐032106‐I].

Notes on contributors

Marta Manzanares Mileo

Marta Manzanares Mileo holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona, where she examined the confectionery trade in early modern Catalonia. She is currently Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Notes

1. The tapestry is located in La Zarzuela Palace, Real Sitio de El Pardo, Madrid. An illustration can be found in: Álvaro Molina Martín, Mujeres y hombres en la España ilustrada: Identidad, género y visualidad (Madrid: Cátedra, 2013), 289. See also: Jutta Held, 'Drawings by Francisco and Ramón Bayeu' Master Drawings 6,1 (1968), 31-36; and José Luís Morales y Marín, Los Bayeu (Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros de Zaragoza, 1979). All translations are my own unless indicated.

2. The Diccionario de Autoridades defines refresco as ‘a warm reception of beverages, sweets and chocolate offered during social visits and other gatherings’. See: Diccionario de Autoridades (5 vols, Madrid, 1737), vol. V, word: refresco.

3. On the changing patterns of sociability between sexes in the context of tertulias, see: María Victoria López-Cordón Cortezo, 'Women in Society in Eighteenth-Century Spain: Models of Sociability', in Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726–1839, Catherine Marie Jaffe, and Elizabeth Franklin Lewis eds., (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Carmen Martín Gaite, Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Berkeley; Oxford: University of California Press, c1991); Mónica Bolufer Peruga, ‘Cambio dinástico: ¿Revolución de las costumbres? La percepción de moralistas, ilustrados y viajeros’, in Felipe V y su tiempo: congreso internacional, Eliseo Serrano Martín ed., (Zaragoza: Institución ‘Fernando el Católico’, 2004), vol. 1, 585–630; Mónica Bolufer Peruga, Mujeres e ilustración: la construcción de la feminidad en la Ilustración española (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnanim, 1998); Molina Martín, Mujeres y hombres en la España ilustrada.

4. There is a vast historiography on the subject, see, for instance: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Jordan Goodman, 'Excitantia or, How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs' in Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt eds, (London: Routledge, 1995), 126–148; Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, c2005); Phil Withington, 'Where Was the Coffee in Early Modern England?' The Journal of Modern History 92 (2020), 40–75; Simon D. Smith, 'Accounting for Taste: British Coffee Consumption in Historical Perspective' Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, no. 2 (1996) 183–214; Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002). On the spread of chocolate across early modern Europe, see, among others: Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, 2008); Louis Evan Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro (eds.), Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, c2009); Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew: the Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford, UK: Polity Press, 1998); Bianca Lindorfer, 'Discovering Taste: Spain, Austria, and the Spread of Chocolate Consumption Among the Austrian Aristocracy, 1650–1700', Food and History 7, no. 1 (2010), 35–5.

5. María Ángeles Pérez Samper, ‘Espacios y prácticas de sociabilidad en el siglo XVIII: Tertulias, refrescos y cafés de Barcelona’ Cuadernos de historia moderna 26 (2001), 11–55; María Ángeles Pérez Samper, ‘Chocolate, té y café: sociedad, cultura y alimentación en la España del siglo XVIII’ in El Conde de Aranda y su tiempo Eliseo Serrano Martín, Esteban Sarasa Sánchez and José Antonio Ferrer Benimeli, eds., (Zaragoza: Diputación Provincial de Zaragoza, Institución ‘Fernando el Católico’, 2000), vol. 1, 157–222; Irene Fattacciu, Empire, Political Economy, and the Diffusion of Chocolate in the Atlantic World (London: Routledge, 2020), 98-127.

6. Nowadays, Spanish hot chocolate is associated with churros, deep-fried long pastries to be dipped, yet no accounts of this pairing are found in the early modern period. Note that the early modern term bizcocho, coming from the Latin bis-coctus (twice-cooked), also applied to a kind of dry biscuit. On sponge biscuits, see: Patricia Bixler Reber, 'Sponge Cake', in The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, Darra Golsdtein ed, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 646; Lizzie Collingham, The Biscuit: The History of a Very British Indulgence (Random House UK, 2021).

7. For an iconographical analysis of these still life paintings, see: Kate E. Holohan, 'Una merienda global: The Americas and China at the Early Modern Spanish Table', Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 97, no. 4 (2020), 485–513.

8. On the origins and adoption of jícaras by Spaniards, see: Marcy Norton, 'Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics', The American Historical Review, 111, no. 3 (2006), esp. 683–686.

9. An exception is Lizzie Collingham’s recent study of the history of biscuit in England, see: Collingham, The Biscuit. Jon Stobart also noted that scholarship has mainly omitted the important role of sugar in the making of cakes and enriched breads served along with tea in the new domestic rituals of sociability in England. See: Jon Stobart, Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 1650–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 9.

10. The composition of chocolate changed over time, and in the eighteenth century, it was limited to cocoa, sugar and cinnamon, and occasionally the fragrant vanilla. This contrasted with earlier recipes when chocolate contained corn starch, nuts and chilies, among other ingredients. See: Norton, ‘Tasting Empire,’ 660–691.

11. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee.

12. Smith, 'Accounting for Taste’; Withington, ‘Where Was the Coffee in Early Modern England?’. On the decrease of consumption of chocolate in England, see: Kate Loveman, 'The Introduction of Chocolate into England: Retailers, Researchers, and Consumers', Journal of Social History 47, no. 1 (2013), 27–46.

13. Fattacciu, Empire, Political Economy, and the Diffusion of Chocolate, esp. 18-43.

14. Irene Fattacciu, 'Atlantic History and Spanish Consumer Goods in the 18th Century: The Assimilation of Exotic Drinks and the Fragmentation of European Identities', Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, (Colloques, 2012); https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.63480. On the colonial chocolate trade, see: Antonio García-Baquero, Cádiz y el Atlántico [1717–1778]: El comercio colonial español bajo el monopolio gaditano (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, C.S.I.C. 1976), 338–339; Lutgardo García Fuentes, El comercio español con América: 1650–1700 (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1980).

15. Melissa Calaresu made a similar point claiming the need to reconsider and broaden the main narratives of sociability and consumption of luxury commodities mostly based on Northern Europe, see: Melissa Calaresu, 'Making and Eating Ice Cream in Naples: Rethinking Consumption and Sociability in the Eighteenth Century', Past and Present 220, no. 1 (2013), 35–78.

16. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Volume 1: The History of Manners (Malden; London: Blackwell, 2000), esp. 72–108. On politeness, see: Lawrence E. Klein, 'Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century', The Historical Journal, 45, no. 4 (2002), 869–898. On early modern Spain, see: Mónica Bolufer Peruga, Arte y artificio de la vida en común: Los modelos de comportamiento y sus tensiones en el siglo de las Luces (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2019).

17. Melissa Calaresu, 'Introduction: The Material Worlds of Food in Early Modern Europe', Journal of Early Modern History 24, no. 1 (2020), 1–16; Sara Pennell, 'Getting Down from the Table: Early Modern Foodways and Material Culture', in The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture, Catherine Richardson and Tara Hamling eds.,(London: Routledge, 2017), 185–196.

18. Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera; Antonio Garrido Aranda; Javier Muñoz Hidalgo, 'Los manipuladores de alimentos en España y América entre los siglos XV y XVIII: los gremios alimentarios y otras normativas de consumo' in Cultura alimentaria de España y América, Antonio Garrido Aranda, ed., (Huesca: La Val de Onsera, D.L., 1995), 169–214. On Barcelona, see: Albert Garcia Espuche, 'Una ciutat d’adroguers', in Drogues, dolços i tabac: Barcelona 1700, Albert Garcia Espuche et al. eds., (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona: Institut de Cultura, DL, 2010), 18–108.

19. Mimi Hellman, 'Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France', Eighteenth-Century Studies 324 (1999), 415–445, esp. 429–30; and Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999), ch.3, esp. 95–97. On the performative nature of dining objects in the Renaissance, see Flora Dennis, 'Scattered Knives and Dismembered Song: Cutlery, Music and the Rituals of Dining', Renaissance Studies 24, no. 1 (2010), 156–184. On the agency of things, more generally, see: Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), esp.16–27.

20. Antonio Lavedán, Tratado de los usos, abusos, propiedades y virtudes del tabaco, café, té y chocolate (Madrid, 1796), 159.

21. Anthony Clarke and Trevor J. Dadson, La España del siglo XIX, 84; Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787 (London, 1792), vol. 2, 142.

22. Ignasi Gironés Sarrió, La taulelleria valenciana dels segles XVII, XVIII i XIX a la col·lecció de la Fundació la Fontana: estudi metodològic i classificació raonada (Valencia: Universitat Politècnica de València, 2016), 192–193; Ana Cabrera Lafuente, Isabel M.ª Rodríguez Marco and Cristina Villar Fernández (coords), La cocina valenciana del Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas (Madrid: Secretaría General Técnica. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 2013); Inocencio V. Pérez Guillén, Azulejos de Benicarló: la Casa de los Miquel y otras arquitecturas (Castellón: Institut de Promoció Ceràmica, 2010).

23. El ceremonial de estrados y crítica de visitas; obra útil, curiosa, y divertida, en que con estilo jocoserio se describe como deben hacerse las visitas de bien venida, de boda, de parida, de duelo, las diarias, y otras cosas que tocan y atañen al propio asunto, y deben saberse y observarse por las Damas que no quieren pasar plaza de poco cultas (Madrid, 1789), n.f.

24. El ceremonial de estrados, y crítica de visitas, n.f.

25. José Clavijo y Fajardo, El Pensador, vol. 5 (Madrid, 1767), 238.

26. Juan de la Mata, Arte de repostería, en que se contiene todo género de hacer dulces secos, y en líquido, vizcochos, turrones y natas. Bebidas heladas de todos los géneros, rosolis, mistelas, etc. (Madrid, 1747), 2.

27. François Massialot, La nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits (Paris, 1716) [1692].

28. Mata, Arte de repostería, 187–188. In Massialot’s work, a similar chapter entitled ‘Manière de bien ordonner un fruit et quelques modelles la dessus’ differed from Mata’s chapter. See: Massialot, La nouvelle instruction pour les confitures … , 457.

29. ‘Ninguno ignora la composición del chocolate (…) el modo de hacerle en la chocolatera para tomarle, se omite también, porque no hay parte, ó casa, aun en la del más mítico aldeano, que no se sepa’. In Mata, Arte de repostería, 144–145. For Massialot’s accounts of chocolate, see: Du caffé, du thé et du chocolate in La nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, 385–386.

30. Juan Bautista Juanini, Discurso phísico, y político, que demuestra los movimientos que produce la fermentación, y materias nitrosas en los cuerpos sublunares y las causas que perturban las benignas, y saludables influencias del ambiente desta villa de Madrid (Madrid, 1689), 223. See also: Lavedán, Tratado de los usos, abusos, propiedades y virtudes …, 223. And: Gómez Arias, Tratado physico médico, de las virtudes, qualidades, provechos, uso, y abuso, del café, del the, del chocolate, y del tabaco, [1752?].

31. Juanini, Discurso phísico, y político … 64.

32. Lavedán, Tratado de los usos, abusos, propiedades y virtudes … , 223.

33. Diccionario de Autoridades, vol. I (1726), word: bollo.

34. Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona, MS 1993, n.f.

35. A similar expansion can be traced in chocolate trade. For an account on guild conflicts over chocolate in Madrid, see: Fattacciu, Empire, Political Economy, and the Diffusion of Chocolate, 75–97. For Barcelona: Marta Manzanares Mileo, 'Cacau, sucre, canyella: Conflictivitat gremial entorn de la xocolata en contextos locals i mediterranis (segles XVII-XVIII)' in Jaume Dantí, Xavier Gil, Diego Sola and Ida Mauro (coords.), Actes del VIII Congrés d’Història Moderna de Catalunya: ‘Catalunya i el Mediterrani’ Barcelona, 17–20 desembre 2018, Pedralbes, 39 (2019): 416–433.

36. Archivo Histórico Nacional (hereafter AHN), Consejos, Sala de alcaldes, lib. 1274, 52.

37. A comprehensive account of these conflict can be found in: Marta Manzanares Mileo, ‘Sweet Debates in Seventeenth-Century Barcelona,’ The Historical Journal 64 (2021), 515–532. Note that a similar conflict arouse in Seville in 1713.Archivo Municipal de Sevilla, Escribanías de Cabildo s. XVIII, t. 48, 9.

38. On Barcelona, see: Albert Garcia Espuche, ‘Una ciutat d’adroguers’.

39. Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona (hereafter AHCB), 1D.IV–36, 126 r.

40. These foodstuffs were acquired for the refresco at the wedding of the nobleman Felip-Mariano de Riquer to Joana de Ros i Delpàs in 1767. In: Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (hereafter ANC), ANC1-1141-T-15.

41. In addition, receipts from chocolate-makers and aiguaders (frozen granita-makers) were recorded for the serving of chocolate, granita, and sweet wines, and their specialised vessels. Chocolate makers’ bills list the payment and shipping fees for cocoa, sugar and cinnamon, stone grinding mills, chocolate pots, charcoal, as well as the price for toasting cocoa beans and the working wages for chocolate makers, revealing that chocolate was prepared in situ. The bill of the aiguader Mariano Fabra listed horchata and frozen granita of strawberry, lemon, cinnamon, frozen milk, apricot and rosoli, a sweet Italian liquor. In: AHCB, 1D.XXI–19/15.19, and 1D.XXI–20.

42. For a literary example of refreshment served by a shoemaker’s apprentice in the day of his master’s exam, see: Anna Maria Villalonga Fernández, Teatre català inèdit del segle XVIII: Exàmen d’un mestre sabater (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona, 2010), 91. For a similar event related to the painters of stained-glass windows, see: Silvia Cañellas i Martínez, 'Exàmens de mestratge dels pintors de vidrieres', Estudis històrics i documents dels arxius de protocols, 280 (1996), 280. For refrescos in the College of grocer-confectioners, see: Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (ACA). Diversos, Colegio de Adrogueros y Confiteros de Barcelona, num.13, f. 116 r.

43. ACA, Diversos, Colegio de Drogueros y Confiteros de Barcelona, num.12, 227 r and, num. 14, 55 r.

44. ACA, Diversos, Colegio de Drogueros y Confiteros de Barcelona, num.12, 119 v-120 r.

45. AHN, Consejo de Castilla. Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte, lib. 1355, 46–51.

46. 'para hacer los bollos y tortas para el chocolate',in: Ordenanzas del gremio de maestros confiteros de esta Corte (Madrid, 1774), 14–15.

47. Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4–84.

48. See, for instance, Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London, 1996) esp. ch. 7, Anne McCants, 'Porcelain for the Poor: The Material Culture of Tea and Coffee Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam', in Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800, ed Paula Findlen (Basingstoke, 2013); Withington, ‘Where Was the Coffee in Early Modern England?’

49. Fattacciu, Empire, Political Economy, and the Diffusion of Chocolate … 144–152.

50. Xavier Lencina, 'Los inventarios “post mortem” en el estudio de la cultura material y el consumo. Propuesta metodológica. Barcelona, siglo XVII', in Consumo, condiciones de vida y comercialización: Cataluña, Castilla, siglos XVII-XIX, Bartolomé Yun Casalilla and Jaume Torras, eds., (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y Leòń, Consejeriá de Educaciòn y Cultura, 1999), 57. See also: Albert Garcia Espuche, La ciutat del Born: Economia i vida quotidiana a Barcelona (segles XIV a XVIII) (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona: Museu d’Històŕia de Barcelona, 2010), 429; Núria Miró i Alaix, ‘L’èxit dels nous productes d’adrogueria: xocolata, te, cafè i tabac,’ in Drogues, dolços i tabac, Albert Garcia Espuche ed., 217–240; Belén Moreno Claverías, Consum i condicions de vida a la Catalunya moderna: El Penedés 1670–1790 (Penedés: Edicions I Propostes Culturals Andanda, 2007).

51. Robin Farwell Gavin, Donna Pierce, and Alfonso Pleguezuelo (eds), Cerámica y cultura: The Story of Spanish and Mexican Mayólica (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, c. 2003), 68; Margaret E. Connors McQuade, Splendor of Alcora: Spanish Ceramics of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 2000), 228 and 242.

52. Among others, see: Coe and Coe, The True History of Chocolate, 135.

53. Christine A. Jones’ study on French tremblesuses (trembling cups) shows that noblewomen used them for similar purposes, since these artefacts provide a more stable holder for chocolate cups when receiving their visitors in bed, a new fashion originated in the French court under the reign of Louis XIV. Christine A. Jones, 'Caution, Contents May Be Hot: A Cultural Anatomy of the Tasse Trembleuse', in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, Christina Ionescu and Ileana Baird eds., (Farnham, Surrey, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 31–48.

54. Several mancerinas and their matching jícaras (chocolate cups) were designed following the Bérain style, since many French professionals worked in Alcora in the early stages of the factory. See: Casanovas, ‘Ceramics in Domestic Life in Spain’, 67.

55. For the context of the early modern Atlantic world, Amanda Lange suggests a similar usage arguing that chocolate stands would hold a wafer or a roll when chocolate was served as a nourishing food to recover the health of the ill and the elderly in bed. See: Amanda Lange, 'Chocolate preparation and serving vessels in early North America', in Chocolate, Grivetti; Shapiro, eds.,138.

56. In Barcelona, the archaeological site of El Born has yielded a considerable amount of tin-glazed earthenware jícaras and mancerinas from local potters, and made in Alcora and Liguria (Italy). See: Miró i Alaix, ‘L’èxit dels nous productes d’adrogueria’.

57. This illustration is part of a collection of sketches depicting the social life of the Catalan elites. See: Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas; Artur Ramon Navarro, and Francesc Quílez i Corella, L’Albada de la modernitat: Josep Bernat Flaugier, Salvador Mayol: els iniciadors de la pintura costumista a la Catalunya del segle XIX (Barcelona: Sala d’Art Artur Ramon, 1994).

58. This piece of furniture was commonly used in noble households in Barcelona by the 1730s. See: Rosa M. Creixell i Cabeza, 'Cases grans: interiors nobles a Barcelona (1739–1761)' (PhD diss. University of Barcelona, 2010), 392.

59. Probate inventories from noble households usually contain an important number of these pieces of furniture along with stools, and chairs to accommodate large social gatherings. See: Creixell i Cabeza, Cases grans, 392.

60. Gaite, Love Customs in Eighteenth-century Spain, 33; López-Cordón Cortezo, 'Women in Society in Eighteenth-Century Spain', 108; C.E. Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750–1800 (Berkeley, Cal., 1932), ch. 10.

61. Jean François Bourgoing, Nouveau voyage en Espagne ou tableau de l’état actuel de cette monarquie (Paris, 1788), 3 vols., vol. 2, 315; Townsend, A Journey through Spain, vol. 2, 142.

62. Anthony Clarke and Trevor J. Dadson, La España del siglo XIX, 84.

63. Pérez Samper, 'Espacios y prácticas de sociabilidad en el siglo XVIII'; Pérez Samper, 'Chocolate, té y café', 198–221; Paco Villar, La ciutat dels cafès: Barcelona: 1750–1880 (Barcelona, 2009).

64. Pérez Samper, 'Chocolate, té y café',160.

65. The fifty-two volumes of his diary are published in Rafael d’Amat i de Cortada, Calaix de Sastre, ed. Ramon Boixareu (Barcelona: Institut Municipal d’Història: Curial, 1987–2003), 11 vols.

66. An ensaimada is a sort of coiled shape bun, made with lard and dusted with refined sugar. See: d’Amat i de Cortada, Calaix de Sastre, vol. 2 (1794).

67. Elias, The Civilising Process, esp. 72–108. On eating with hands, see also: Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (London: Viking, 1992), esp. 182–195. Note Helen Pfeifer’s work on Ottoman dining stressed that Elias’ views on the implications of material objects and table manners should not be applied to the Eastern dining culture, which is heavily reliable on finger eating. See: Helen Pfeifer, 'The Gulper and the Slurper: A Lexicon of Mistakes to Avoid While Eating With Ottoman Gentlemen' Journal of Early Modern History 24, no. 1 (2020), 41–62.

68. Representations of dipping are quite rare in other European contexts. One exception is the 1754 Jean-Étienne Liotard’s portrayal of a French family, recently acquired by the National Gallery in London, depicting a young girl dunking a biscuit into her morning cup of coffee under the careful observation of her mother.

69. The combination of wafers and dessert wines, namely hippocras, can be traced back to medieval times. See: Rudolf Grewe (ed.), Llibre de Sent Soví. Llibre de totes maneres de potatges de menjar (Barcelona, 2003). For the eighteenth-century, see numerous examples in Maldà’s Calaix de Sastre.

70. Collingham, The Biscuit, 98–99. Some examples of toasting biscuits can be found in: Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu (eds), Feast and Fast: The Art of Food in Europe (Cambridge: University of Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum: PWP, c2019), 75.

71. Collingham, The Biscuit, 98–99.

72. For an account of the relationship between dental afflictions and the consumption of sugar in early modern Europe, see Florent Quellier, Festins, ripailles et bonne chère au Grand Siècle (Paris: Belin, 2015), 288; J.W. Moore, ‘Dental Caries in Britain from Roman Times to the Nineteenth Century’ in Food, Diet and Economic Change Past and Present, Catherine Giessler and Derek Oddy, eds.., (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), 50–61.

73. See, for example, Amat i de Cortada, Calaix de Sastre, vol. 2 (1794).

74. Antoine de Courtin, La urbanidad y cortesía universal que se practica entre las personas de distinción (Madrid, 1778 [1744]), Ignacio Benito Avalle trans.

75. For a complete account of the language and models of civility in early modern Spain, see: Bolufer Peruga, Arte y artificio de la vida en común; Fernando Ampudia de Haro, Las bridas de la conducta: Una aproximación al proceso civilizatorio español (Madrid: CIS Siglo XXI de España, 2007).

76. Antoine de Courtin, La urbanidad y cortesía universal, 129–130.

77. Courtin, La urbanidad y cortesía universal. A version of the same extract can be found in Jean-Baptiste La Salle, Reglas de cortesía y urbanidad cristiana para uso de las escuelas cristianas, in Obras Completas, trans. José María Valladolid (Madrid, 2001), 239.

78. Courtin, La urbanidad y cortesía universal, 121.

79. Juan de Lagunas, Documentos de buena crianza (Madrid, 1658), 6.

80. La Salle, Reglas de cortesía y urbanidad cristiana, 244.

81. Mata, Arte de repostería, 188.

82. d’Amat i de Cortada, Calaix de Sastre, vols. 1 (1791) and 2 (1792).

83. Diccionario de Autoridades, vol. V (1739), word: zapatilla. The modern Diccionari català-valencià-balear (DCVB) d’A. M. Alcover i F. de B. Moll defines the Catalan term ditet as ‘piece of sweet pastry usually to be consumed with chocolate’.

84. d’Amat i de Cortada, Calaix de Sastre, vol. V (1794), 18.

85. Len Fisher, How to Dunk a Doughnut: The Science of Everyday Life (Phoenix, 2003), 2.

86. Fisher, How to Dunk a Doughnut.

87. This recipe comes from the 1681 manuscript recipe collection of the confectioner journeyman Batista Escofet in Cadaqués, in northern Catalonia. See: ANC1–1021, n.f.

88. ANC1–1021, n.f.

89. Bixler Reber, 'Sponge Cake', 646.

90. In 1809 the Baron of Maldà also comments on the challenges of handling the boiling chocolate cups, see: d’Amat i de Cortada, Calaix de Sastre, vol. 8 (1809).

91. Hellman, 'Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure'  esp. 429–30; Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics, 95–97.

92. Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics, 97.

93. Marcel Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’, trans. Ben Brewster, Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973), 70–88.