ABSTRACT
This chapter considers recipe and cookbook writing as a vernacular literary practice. It discusses the ongoing colonial legacies of chocolate as it has become a global sweet, as apparent in the industrialization of chocolate processing and in labor practices in West Africa, where the majority of cacao is grown. Culinary and medicinal knowledge of chocolate has been exchanged for centuries through recipes, while desires for chocolate's richness have contributed to histories of colonialism, human trafficking, and the propagation and circulation of plants. According to Brian Cowan, chocolate, akin to other New World commodities, first entered European cultures: as medicinal products, and they were all quickly slotted into the prevailing Galenic medical paradigm. A significant text for the literature of chocolate as well as the contemporary food justice movement, the novel thus speaks to histories of the African-American and Caribbean foodways.
