Review of Chocolate: How a New World commodity conquered Spanish literature by Erin Alice Cowling

Abstract

Chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain and it is the main subject of Cowling’s book. Within, Cowling discusses the material importance that chocolate had in the New World and how it was assimilated into European society as a commercial, medicinal, and sexual commodity. Cowling’s major contribution is to trace the mention of chocolate in Spanish literary works and historical papers of the early modern period, including poems, plays, medical and religious treatises, as a means of measuring the ways and the extent to which chocolate was incorporated into Spanish society.