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Book Excerpts:
Cocoa and Chocolate
Baron von Liebig, one of the
best-known writers on dietetics,
says:
"It (chocolate) is a perfect food,
as wholesome as delicious, a
beneficient restorer of exhausted
power; but its quality must be good
and it must be carefully prepared.
It is
highly nourishing and easily
digested, and is fitted to repair
wasted strength, preserve health,
and prolong life.
It agrees with
dry temperaments and convalescents;
with mothers who nurse their
children; with those whose
occupations oblige them to undergo
severe mental strains; with public
speakers, and with all those who
give to work a portion of the time
needed for sleep.
It soothes
both stomach and brain, and for this
reason, as well as for others, it is
the best friend of those engaged in
literary pursuits."
It is well known that Linnĉus called
the fruit of the cocoa tree
theobroma, 'food for the gods.'
The cause of this emphatic
qualification has been sought, and
attributed by some to the fact that
he was extravagantly fond of
chocolate; by others to his desire
to please his confessor; and by
others to his gallantry, a queen
having first introduced it into
France.
"The Spanish ladies of the New
World, it is said, carried their
love for
chocolate to such a degree that, not
content with partaking of it
several times a day, they had it
sometimes carried after them to
church.
"Time and experience," he says
further, "have shown that
chocolate,
carefully prepared, is an article of
food as wholesome as it is
agreeable; that it is nourishing,
easy of digestion, and does not
possess those qualities injurious to
beauty with which coffee has
been reproached; that it is
excellently adapted to persons who
are obliged to a great concentration
of intellect; in the toils of the
pulpit or the bar, and especially to
travellers; that it suits the most
feeble
stomach; that excellent effects have
been produced by it in chronic
complaints, and that it is a last
resource in affections of the
pylorus.
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