On the Chocolate Trail

Sephardi Jews contributed to the availability of drinking chocolate when that became a very popular substitute for politicized tea in North America around the time of the 1773 Boston Tea Party. The Gomez family members (NYC) and Aaron Lopez (Newport) were among the several North American Jews who engaged in the manufacture, retail, and consumption

If, as one of my friends has taught me, food is love, then chocolate manifests the densest, deepest and sweetest of loves. When we slather our mothers with chocolatey tributes in a few days, we will be stepping onto a chocolate trail pioneered by Jewish mothers before us, notably Rebecca Gomez of the 18th century.

When fantasizing about the publication of On the Chocolate Trail, I imagined a chocolatey cover that either would include actual samples or at least might be scratch and sniff.  That proved a bit too ambitious, unfortunately. I do love the look of the final cover, though it only activates one of the senses. The Belgian

Today’s tough economics send many of us to sweets and chocolate to find comfort on tighter budgets. Candy satisfies us today; in the Colonial Period in North America, the daily menu often included drinking chocolate. In 1747 a minister only identified as “Your humble Servant, T.W.,” published a lament about his congregation not maintaining his

In the pioneering days of chocolate in our country, pastoral ministrations using chocolate took several forms. Judge Samuel Sewall, (March 28, 1652 – January 1, 1730) a Massachusetts judge involved in the Salem witch trials, (he later apologized) recorded in his diary that his pastoral ministration bundled visits and sermons with gifts of chocolate: “Monday,

This past April we managed a return visit to CoCo Chocolatier, as we settled into  Williamsburg, Virginia, for some research about Colonial chocolate at the Rockefeller Library.  A break from the data bases of early historical newspapers and library took us to Colonial Williamsburg’s chocolate making day, which occurs the first Tuesday of each month. 

Last weekend on a stormy June day (2009), Mark and I packed our barely awake Brooklyn based adult kids into a rental car for what our 26 year old called a “family fun day,” an outing to the Gomez Mill House, the oldest extant Jewish homestead in America of 1714 built by the Gomez family,