Moved in at last

[rinue]

I finally have a houseplant that isn't windowsill herbs! It was on sale at the grocery store, and the label was vague, so I've had to identify it through my own taxonomic skill. It's either the Pachira Aquatica or the Pachira Glabra, but I think the only way to know definitively is for it to produce a seed pod, which would be either 12-inches long and brown (Aquatica) or 6-inches long and green (Glabra), which it won't do before it's four or five years old, and probably not ever at all as an indoor plant. So it is a plant of eternal mystery which could end up being about 10 feet tall.

Comments

[cremains]

Rinue, I have a question for you. I was reading a biography of Oscar Wilde recently and it gave a list of the things prisoners were given to eat and drink, which due to being truly terrible were the cause of rampant dysentery, overflowing chamberpots overnight which the prisoners had to swab every morning, etc. Anyway on that list it says they were given cocoa in the mornings. I can't believe it was the sweet, rich drink we have today. Do you know what it means?

[rinue]

I suspect it was cocoa, approximately like the hot chocolate we have now; it was a common enough British breakfast of the period. It shows up in a lot of children's songs and poems as a cheap/easy meal served by a nanny, or in recollections of skimming the "skin" off the top because the milk was overboiled.

The UK produces a lot of dairy; most of their land is good for grasses (which can be eaten by cows and sheep) but doesn't work as cropland. Meanwhile, cocoa was being imported from the colonies, and Cadbury had figured out a very inexpensive way to process it into powder. So it's reasonable to think cocoa was a cheap and low-cleanup way to get calories into someone - kind of along the lines of carnation instant breakfast, or slim fast, or the various chocolate-flavored protein shakes. Notably, cocoa is such a strong flavor it can disguize the taste of spoiled milk.

It was probably a bit bitterer than most hot chocolate now, though, a bit more like some of the dark single-source organic stuff you sometimes get if you're into that kind of thing (which I sometimes am), rather than something alkalized like Swiss Miss.

[cremains]

I am happy to be enlightened but also a combo of vindicated in my guess that you would know what Oscar Wilde's hot chocolate would taste like down to a T, and so curious. Is it that you've accumulated such a mass already of, not sure of a good word for this in English, like the little factual details of life but in history, that you just knew? Or did you look it up but in what sort of book could you have looked it up? Basically I want to learn what is the way to have known the answer myself.

[rinue]

Well, mostly it's a matter of a long process of accumulation, to be able to sort of know what I don't know some of the time? Like, I had an instinct about it that was based on some children's poems, but then I did some googling around to check myself. Oscar Wilde and cocoa didn't turn up much beyond the same thing you'd already said, but I could go look at the history of Cadbury's, which has been around long enough that it was the major chocolatier in England back then as well as now. I knew a bit about the "Dutch process" of alkalyzing chocolate from my experience with baking (which I'm not brilliant at but can do), and I knew about English dairy industry production rates versus availability of domestic produce thanks to rationing during WWII. Then it was a matter of using combinations of that information in search strings to get at the likely answer.

I don't know whether I'm explaining this well. I think the key insight was "research chocolate instead of Oscar Wilde, because this was going to be central to the history of chocolate in England but not central to most people's understanding of Oscar Wilde."