ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 provides insight into certain passages in the history of consumption by observing how chocolate not only occupied a place of honor in the lives of both the upper and upper-middle classes but also came to acquire a multifaceted and controversial identity poised somewhere between exotic French and Spanish and between national drink and foreign fashion, depending on the consumer. This social and geographical mapping of consumption is based on different sources but mainly on postmortem inventories, which made it possible to map consumption both geographically and socially, as well as to examine the extent to which chocolate penetrated the daily lives of the Spanish people.
