Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate (Madrid, 1631)
The first printed monograph on chocolate: a quarto by a physician and surgeon of Écija, arguing against a colleague that the American drink was good for you, and printing the compound recipe, four kinds of chile by their Nahuatl names, and the shade-tree method of growing cacao. It also tells a European cook what to use when the American ingredients cannot be had, which is how a Mesoamerican preparation became a European one — over five thousand years after Amerindians first cultivated the tree.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of how chocolate reached Europe run on anecdote — Cortés at Moctezuma's table, monks in an Oaxacan convent — and cite Colmenero at second hand, through the 1652 English version or through a modern survey, usually for the single fact that he defended the drink. The 1631 Madrid sheets, opened and quoted here, carry what the retellings drop: the compound recipe with its explicit European substitutions, four chiles distinguished by Nahuatl name and habitat, the shade-tree method of growing cacao, the pod holding ten or twelve beans, a pharmacological claim grounded on "la comun pratica que tienen los Medicos en las Indias", and a scholastic refutation of a named opponent. Sabin's bibliography then documents the French, Latin and English translations that made it a European text, and a 2024 archaeogenomic study puts five thousand years of Amerindian cultivation underneath it, so the episode can be stated as what it was — a transfer of indigenous knowledge, described with unusual precision by a provincial Spanish surgeon — rather than as a discovery or as a legend about a conqueror.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The title page of the copy read here reads "CVRIOSO TRATADO DE LA NATVRALEZA Y CALIDAD DEL CHOCOLATE, DIVIDIDO EN quatro puntos. En el primero se trata, que sea Chocolate; y que calidad tenga el Cacao, y los demas ingredientes. En el segundo, se trata la calidad que resulta de todos ellos. En el tercero se trata el modo de hazerlo, y de quantas maneras se toma en las Indias, y qual dellas es mas saludable. El vltimo punto trata de la quantidad, y como se ha de tomar, y en que tiempo, y que personas. POR EL LICENCIADO ANTOnio Colmenero de Ledesma, Medico y Cirujano de la ciudad de Ecija. CON PRIVILEGIO. EN MADRID. Por Francisco Martinez. Año de 1631." The author is a practitioner in an Andalusian town, not a court physician, and the book's third point is explicitly about American practice — how it is taken in the Indies, and which of those ways is the most healthy.
The recipe is printed in full, and half of it is instructions for substitution. "A cada cien Cacaos se le mezclan dos chiles, de los que tengo dicho, grandes que se llaman Chilpatlagua, y en lugar destos de las Indias, se pueden procurar los mas anchos, y menos calientes pimientos de España. De anis vn puño, orejuelas, que llaman Vinacaxtlidos, y otros dos que llaman Mecasuchil, si el vientre estuuiere astrito. Y en lugar deste en España seis rosas de Alexandria en poluos. Vainilla de campeche vna, canela dos adarmes, almendras, y auellanas, de cada cosa vna docena, açucar media libra. Achiote la cantidad que bastare para teñirlo todo. Y si no se hallaren algunas cosas de las Indias, se harà con lo demas." Spanish sweet peppers for Mexican chilpatlagua, powdered Alexandria roses for mecasúchil: the europeanisation of the drink is written into the prescription as a series of named replacements.
The book carries American botanical vocabulary and American classification into Madrid print. It distinguishes four kinds of chile by their Nahuatl names and their properties — "Chilchotes" and the very small "Chilcecpin", both biting and hot; "Tonalchiles", moderately hot, yellow, eaten with bread as though they were fruit and "solo se crian en los pueblos de la laguna de Mexico"; and "Chilpatlagua", broad peppers, less hot, "los vsuales, i que se echan en el Chocolate". It identifies "Mecasuchil" and "Vinacaxtli, que en nuestro vulgar llaman orejuelas", the aromatic flowers of the compound, and notes that in the Indies a purgative syrup is made from the first.
Where the author's authority comes from is stated rather than implied, and it is American. Achiote has an incising and attenuating quality, he writes, "como consta de la comun pratica que tienen los Medicos en las Indias, experimentados de sus efectos, pues lo conceden para incindir y atenuar los humores gruessos que causan el asma, y la detencion de la orina". The proof offered for a pharmacological claim in a Madrid book of 1631 is the settled practice of physicians in the Indies who have tried it.
The treatise also transmits the agronomy. Cacao, it says, is so delicate a tree, and the land where it grows so excessively hot, "que para que el Sol no lo consuma, plantan primero otros arboles, y despues de auer crecido plantan el arbol del Cacao, para que quando salga de la tierra le siruan de pauellon" — the shade-tree method of a cacao grove, described for European readers; and the fruit does not come bare but "metidos diez ò doze cacaos dentro de vna calabacilla, tan grande como vna breua".
The book is an argument in a dispute, and it argues in the forms of the schools. Against "nuestro aduersario" it invokes the rule that "à dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter no vale la consequencia": it does not follow that because cacao is astringent, the confection made of cacao and the other ingredients is astringent. It also reports, as evidence for the necessity of grinding, that eating the bean whole as fruit "como lo hazen las Criollas en Indias, las opila, y obstruye notablemente", because the several substances of the bean are not intimately mixed by chewing alone. The physiology is the humoral physiology of its century; the observation of what people actually did with cacao in the Indies is first-hand reporting inside it.
Sabin's bibliography records the book and the route it travelled. Under Colmenero de Ledesma it enters the Madrid 1631 printing by Francisco Martínez, collated as 4to, two unnumbered and eleven numbered leaves, with Rich's description: "This work treats of the quality of cocoa, and other ingredients in making chocolate: how chocolate is made, and the different modes of using it in the Indies." It then lists a French translation by René Moreau, Paris 1643; a Latin one, "Chocolata Inda opusculum de qualitate et natura chocolatæ", edited by Marco Aurelio Severino, Nuremberg 1644; and an English "Treatise on chocolate", London 1652. Within a generation the Écija surgeon's tract was available in the three learned languages of northern Europe.
The English translator's name is given by Sabin as "Capt. James Woodworth", where the standard modern form is Wadsworth. The discrepancy is recorded here rather than silently corrected, because the bibliography is the source actually opened and the correction was not verified against a copy of the London edition, which could not be reached.
Modern medical history places the treatise inside a controversy and inside a change of taste. Colmenero "fundamentally disagreed with Marradon, arguing that chocolate was a beneficial health drink", and organised his book round what chocolate is, what its quality is, how to make and drink it, and when and how much. In the same decades "Spanish consumers were gradually changing the flavor of the import by adding sugar and spices more congenial to their palate than the rather more bitter taste favored by the natives". The theological question that shadowed the drink — whether taking it broke the ecclesiastical fast — was settled only in 1662, when Cardinal Brancaccio declared that liquidum non frangit jejunum.
The medicinal use the Spanish books describe was documented from Mesoamerican practice before they wrote: the Badianus manuscript of 1552, compiled at Tlatelolco by indigenous authors, already records cacao preparations against complaints including angina, constipation, dysentery, indigestion, fatigue, gout and haemorrhoids. Later European physicians reduced the field to three headings — to help patients gain weight, to stimulate the nervous system, and to improve digestion.
What the 1631 treatise handles as a novelty was by then a very old American crop, and the measure of that is now archaeological rather than documentary. An archaeogenomic study of 352 archaeological items from 19 pre-Columbian cultures, spanning some 5,000 years, found Theobroma cacao ancient DNA in 73 of 118 South American ceramic samples and theobromine in 116 of 311, and dates domestication in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon to at least 5,300 years ago, with cacao carried by human networks to the Pacific coast of Ecuador and to Caribbean Colombia more than five thousand years ago. The Spanish contribution in this story is description, transfer and adaptation of an Amerindian plant and an Amerindian preparation, not their discovery.