There’s nothing fairly like a cup of scorching chocolate. However have you ever ever had one from a coconut cup? Assistant Curator Dr Emily Taylor and Professor Kathleen Kennedy discover the origins and cultural background behind a ‘little cup of happiness’ in our collections – a coconut shell made right into a goblet for decent chocolate.
A short historical past of coconut cups and scorching chocolate (Prof Kathleen Kennedy)
This small, polished coconut shell harnessed into the type of a goblet provides an instance of a significant colonial American houseware which may be distinctive in Scotland. When the cup arrived in Edinburgh in 1956, it was only one anomalous half of a big and really various donation. Mid-twentieth-century cataloguers missed the bigger colonial origin of this coconut cup. Correctly generally known as a coco chocolatero, this can be a model of coconut cup developed within the early colonial Americas for consuming the necessary indigenous beverage, chocolate.
The Spanish and Portuguese introduced coconuts and coconut cups with them after they arrived within the Americas on the finish of the fifteenth century. As humorous as the enduring sketch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in regards to the viability of coconuts arriving in medieval Britain is, by 1500, the coconut cup was an outdated and well-liked type of high quality dinnerware throughout Europe.
In actual fact, coconuts had been a daily import from India into the Mediterranean basin because the second century AD, together with different, higher recognized commodities like pepper. Exterior of Europe, to today many languages retain the older title for coconut, used since Roman instances: “Indian nut.” Medieval and early fashionable European coconut cups employed massive coconut shells and customarily stood on tall, handle-less stems.
Within the American areas that the Europeans invaded first, chocolate was the indigenous formal beverage. It was one with its personal imperial historical past, with taxes paid to the conquering Mexica Empire in cacao beans, and chocolate consumed solely by the very best castes. It’s not stunning that the Europeans shortly adopted this American imperial drink. The Earl of Sandwich’s scorching chocolate recipe for 2 from 1668, for instance, requires:
4 tbsp uncooked cacao
1 tsp cinnamon
Pinch of Jamaica pepper (allspice)
2 tbsp sugar
3 vanilla pods, eliminated earlier than serving (or 1tsp vanilla essence)
Milk – to drinkers’ style
In lower than a century after c.1500, a brand new time period appeared in colonial American information: coco chocolatero, or just, coco, a brief type that already carried the connotation of a coconut cup redesigned for chocolate. The high quality dinnerware of the Europeans hybridized with American conventional foodways leading to a brand new houseware that embodied colonial Latin America.
On this Americanizing course of, a number of adjustments have been made to the coco chocolatero design. The European coconut cup’s stem was shortened, the shells shrank considerably, and the cups sprouted small handles. In contrast to European coconut cups, American smiths solid the metalwork for cocos utilizing moulds, which they copied and shared, and so comparable shapes seem time and again. Handles very just like the museum’s coco could be discovered elsewhere, and one other well-liked deal with featured the Spanish lion.
Whereas chocolate was loved extensively, native cultures influenced the type of their cocos. On our coco, the snakes might counsel an origin in present-day Mexico or Guatemala., The snakes probably characterize Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake god of the Mexica (Aztec is a colonial title) and Maya, who was typically depicted with a head that appears dragon-like to Europeans.
These ‘dragons’ increase one other risk, nonetheless. This very American coco chocolatero may replicate the lion-like heads of Chinese language dragons. For a time, the solar by no means set on the Spanish empire. Chinese language items, together with porcelain embellished with dragons, was loaded onto Spanish ships within the Spanish Philippines, carried throughout the Pacific, offloaded in western ports of New Spain, carried overland to ports on the jap coast, after which shipped throughout the Atlantic to Spain. Thus, colonial Spanish-American elites have been simply as accustomed to Chinese language porcelain as their European friends, and a few might even have appreciated the similarity of Chinese language dragons with Quetzalcoatl. Do the dragon-like creatures on this coco chocolatero replicate a Spanish-American silversmith’s impression of Chinese language dragons? It’s not unattainable.
As a typical utensil of the Latin American chocolate service, cocos chocolateros featured in each artwork and commerce. By the eighteenth century, cocos have been so well-known that Mexican painter Antonio Pérez de Aguilar included one in his nonetheless lifetime of a cabinet. Such proof demonstrates that, together with different kinds of chocolate utensils, cocos made their approach again throughout the Atlantic as chocolate unfold. In line with descriptions in inventories and newspapers, by the seventeenth century even English royalty owned what might effectively have been cocos chocolateros.
Cocos chocolateros have been so tightly linked with colonization that they fell out of use as independence actions unfold throughout Latin American within the nineteenth century. This was about the identical time that espresso changed chocolate as a most popular beverage and as an necessary money crop for brand spanking new nations.
But, for a similar motive, cocos have been perceived by some as historic mementos of a colonial previous. Our cup is extra prone to be an instance of such colonial nostalgia than it’s thus far to the colonial interval itself. Till extra scholarly work on cocos chocolateros happens, and with out scientific evaluation of the metallic content material of our coco, its path to Scotland from the Americas stays a little bit of a thriller.
Getting into a nationwide assortment (Emily Taylor)
We will, nonetheless, start to grasp the ultimate leg of the cocos journey, which introduced it into public possession.
It was donated to Nationwide Museums Scotland by Sir Eric Miller (1882-1958), seen beneath dancing with a piece colleague at an workplace get together celebrating his fiftieth anniversary with Harrisons and Crosfield in 1949. Born Hans Eric Müller, Miller was from Darlington, the son of a German schoolmaster. After his father’s dying he moved to London along with his mom and sister, the place he entered into the enterprise profession that outlined his life. An organization director from 1908, Miller was chairman from 1924-1956, when declining well being pressured him to scale back his obligations.
Harrisons and Crosfield originated as a Liverpool agency and moved to commerce from London in 1854. Described by Elizabeth Ewing as ‘virtually an financial commonwealth’, Harrisons and Crosfield was the father or mother to many firms. Sir Eric Miller held directorships of eighteen subsidiary firms throughout his profession. In 1899, when Miller first joined the corporate, it acquired its first tea property and opened an workplace in Calcutta (now generally known as Kolkata). Then got here the brand new rubber commerce, which Miller was on the coronary heart of. He acted as secretary to the primary rubber plantation firm to be floated on the London Inventory Trade by Harrisons and Crosfield in 1903. One in every of his directorships mixed new (rubber) with established (coconut) commerce within the Soenqei Rampah Rubber and Coconut Plantations Restricted.
The “growth in Rubber” as Miller described it to a pal in 1909, led him into shut correspondence and conferences with enterprise counterparts in Edinburgh, the place there was an curiosity in each the know-how and manufacturing. Miller swapped concepts about ‘Purub’ and ‘Coagulum’, completely different qualities of rubber, in addition to passing on engineer’s notes to Edinburgh colleagues about the usage of the Blackstone Oil Engine on firm estates. It’s doubtless he grew to become accustomed to the Chambers Road Museum throughout certainly one of his enterprise journeys to town.
We will achieve some perception to Miller’s early profession from letters within the firm archive. Writing to a colleague and pal in Might 1906, Miller acknowledged:
“I ought to have replied sooner, had I had time final mail.
However that was unattainable, nonetheless, as I used to be full as much as the final & it’s 8 tonight earlier than I had time for dropping you a line. – We’re nonetheless with out the brand new workplaces & shall be until finish of June. A beastly nuisance with all this work in hand. – My life is hardly price residing & till I can get room for some extra fellows, it is going to proceed so.”
And but, Miller’s profession is outlined by a optimistic mindset. Elsewhere, he supportively writes, “Keep on with it, & let’s hope factor ‘ll prove effectively.”
From the archives we all know that Harrisons and Crosfield firm workers travelled, generally extensively, with a view to perform their enterprise. However it’s unlikely that is the place Miller’s coco got here from. Miller grew to become an avid collector from British sellers and auctions and a valued contributor to museum and library collections. He had a private assortment that furnished his house in Surrey and was bought after his dying, however throughout his lifetime he contributed each straight and not directly (similar to by means of the Nationwide Artwork Collections Fund within the UK) to public collections.
Workers from the Nationwide Maritime Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum attended Miller’s funeral. However we additionally know he contributed to the Port of London Authority library, the British Library, the British Museum, the library at Malay Home and what was then the brand new Malayan Museum. Miller’s colleague Sir Eric Macfayden additionally wrote in The Tea and Rubber Mail obituary that Miller selected to divide legacies ‘inter vivos’ after twenty-five years on the firm. That’s, he needed his buddies to get pleasure from legacies he meant for them whereas he was nonetheless alive.
Whereas we’re but to search out the particular origins of the coco or of its counterpart, which was gifted to Nationwide Museums Scotland on behalf of Sir Eric Miller by The Nationwide Artwork Collections Fund, we do know that the coco was a present meant for public enjoyment. It was given within the spirit of Miller’s 1949 celebration speech conclusion: ‘If I ever had an epitaph I might be effectively rewarded if it learn, within the phrases of the music: – ‘He unfold somewhat happiness and he handed by’.
The journey which formed the coco chocolatero and introduced it to Nationwide Museums Scotland is undeniably certainly one of colonial settlement, commerce, plantations and enterprise. Additionally it is certainly one of social ceremony and traditions of gifting throughout the centuries. As we delve deeper into understanding the worldwide imbalances and legacies that colonies and plantation firms created, it’s price remembering the ‘little happiness’ of a cup designed for chocolate.
