Wikipedia:Peer review/History of chocolate/archive1

History of chocolate

I've listed this article for peer review because I'm looking to get it to FA if possible. Trying to get it to be comprehensive has been a challenge.

Thanks, Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 09:27, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

From Tim riley

The article should be consistently spelled. At present we have English spellings (colour, flavour, idealised) and American spellings (flavored, neighbors, labor). It should be one or the other throughout. I'll look in again if I have time: from a quick first read-through the article looks pretty good. Tim riley talk 10:11, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

 Done Thankyou for the comment, I really appreciate it. Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 10:16, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Concluding comments from Tim

Rollinginhisgrave, this a fine article and I have much enjoyed reading it. Some or even all of these points may be of use:

• You write "From the late-16th century until the early 18th century, there was controversy whether chocolate was both a food and a drink or just a drink; this distinction was important for determining if consumption violated ecclesiastical fasts", but as I understand it, in 1569 Pope Pius V declared that drinking chocolate was not a breach of the Lent fasting rules, as he found it tasted so awful that it could not possibly do any moral harm, which isn't quite what your text says.
  • Popes held that it did not break ecclesiastical fasts, but this did not significantly quell the controversy. I have left a comment to that effect.
• In 1591 Juan de Cárdenas published the first medical book that dealt with the effects on health of chocolate.
  • Considering this undue given the treatment in Chocolate as medicine: receives a small mention and doesn't receive much attention in Coe and Coe. Neither makes the claim it is the first medical book published. I did add some info on humorism being the justification for the Spanish serving chocolate warm.
• You say, "When chocolate was introduced to France is therefore difficult to pinpoint, but evidence suggests it was first introduced as medicine", but according to the only book on my shelves on the subject (OCLC 61755785) , Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain, introduced it to the French court after her marriage to Louis XIII in 1615.
  • I've left a footnote; essentially we don't really have evidence this is true.
• Linnaeus gave cacao its official Latin botanical name, Theobroma (food of the gods) in 1753.
  • Added
• I'm not sure about the first of your two paras on the etymology of the word. This is from The Oxford Companion to Food:

Linguists believe that cacao is in origin not a Maya but a Mixe-Zoquean word (perhaps kakawa), suggesting that the Maya learnt to use the product from the earlier Olmec culture, which flourished in the Veracruz and Tabasco provinces of Mexico between 1500 and 400 BC. Olmec hieroglyphs have not been deciphered, so we cannot read what they themselves said of cacao. No linguistic or archaeological evidence allows us to trace cacao or chocolate further back than this. The successor Izapan civilization spread Olmec culture, and perhaps cacao cultivation, to the Pacific littoral of Mexico and Guatemala: it was perhaps from the Izapans that the Maya would have learnt of chocolate.

The etymology of cacao is separate to that of chocolate.

Some thoughts on the prose as it stands:

• "Evidence of cacao domestication exists as early as circa 3300 BC" – it exists now: you need "from" before the "as"
• "While the highest-quality chocolate was pure ... While Aztec chocolate drinks are commonly understood ... While some Spanish observers claimed..." – you are fond of using "while": it occurs 14 times in your text, and starts to seem a bit repetitive after a while. I suggest you keep it for its purely temporal sense, as in "A member of the Columbus expedition, while documenting the items on the canoe," and "expanded cacao production while increasing tribute requirements", and using "although" when that is what you mean, or possibly recast the prose to include a few more buts (e.g "While mole poblano, a sauce that contains chocolate, is commonly associated with the Aztecs, it originated in territory that was never occupied by them" could be "Mole poblano, a sauce that contains chocolate, is commonly associated with the Aztecs, but it originated in territory that was never occupied by them" (which, in passing, might be better in the active rather than the passive – "territory that they never occupied").
• "The Marquise de Coëtlogon took so much chocolate ..." – we don't put block quotes in quotation marks (MoS)
• conched chocolate made chocolate a more common ingredient in baking – the repetition of "chocolate" is infelicitous, surely?
• After Cadbury bought Fry's in 1918 – the merger was agreed in 1918 but did not take effect until 1919. This is from The Yorkshire Post of 23 May 1919, p. 3:

BIG COCOA COMBINE, CADBURY'S AND FRY’S—CAPITAL £2,500,000. A new company has been registered at Somerset House to bring about a union of interests between the great cocoa and chocolate businesses of Cadbury and Fry. The British Cocoa and Chocolate Company, Lid., is the title of the new concern, which has a capital of £2,500,000 in £1 shares.

 Done Thankyou for catching this

I hope these points are of use. Please ping me when you get to FAC. Tim riley talk 14:38, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Tim, all these points have been addressed even if not endorsed. Thankyou so much for your time on this. Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 06:52, 28 November 2024 (UTC)