Chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain and it is the main subject of Cowling’s book. Within, Cowling discusses the material importance that chocolate had in the New World and how it was assimilated into European society as a commercial, medicinal, and sexual commodity. Cowling’s major contribution is to trace the mention of chocolate in Spanish literary works and historical papers of the early modern period, including poems, plays, medical and religious treatises, as a means of measuring the ways and the extent to which chocolate was incorporated into Spanish society.

L’un des premiers aliments à voyager du Nouveau Monde vers l’Espagne a été le chocolat et c’est le sujet principal du livre de Cowling. L’auteure y traite de l’importance matérielle du chocolat dans le Nouveau Monde et de la manière dont il a été considéré comme un produit commercial, médicinal et sexuel dans la société européenne. La principale contribution de Cowling est de retracer les mentions du chocolat dans les œuvres littéraires et les documents historiques espagnols du début de la période moderne, y compris dans des poèmes, des pièces de théâtre, des traités médicaux et religieux, afin de mesurer les modalités et l’ampleur de l’intégration du chocolat dans la société espagnole.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Ihsan, A., (2025), "Review of Chocolate: How a New World commodity conquered Spanish literature by Erin Alice Cowling", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.648)

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1. chocolate
2. Erin Alice Cowling
3. food
4. food as commodity
5. indigenous food

Original publication: Ihsan, Aqeel. "Review of Chocolate: How a New World commodity conquered Spanish literature by Erin Alice Cowling." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 10, no. 3, 2023, pp. 133-135. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.648. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.