Hearing I was planning a piece on the Church’s penchant for puddings, Dante, my naughty godson, immediately dived into Google, determined to find tales of nubile pre-pubescent Ethiopians thrusting gold-encrusted truffles into the mouths of corrupt Medici popes. Much to his disappointment, he found no steamy papal peccadilloes; instead, he found controversy, murder and corruption.
The Papal See’s attitude to puddings and all things sweet has been, over the centuries, almost as contentious as that towards the liturgy – which is curious given that the Almighty sent an angel to bake a cake for Elijah in the wilderness. Chocolate in particular has had a chequered reputation within the church, alternately dismissed as the stuff of pagans and as a tool for poison, and then lauded as a reward following a fast.
The chocolate controversy seems to have first arisen in the 17th century, predictably between the Dominicans and the Jesuits. The former were generally suspicious of chocolate: women picked and prepared the beans – pagan, indigenous South American women, at that. Dominicans also wanted to ban the increasingly popular practice of drinking chocolate during fast days. The Jesuits, keen traders and consumers of cacao, were advocates of this new fashion. The crux of the matter lay in whether, in the eyes of the church, chocolate was a drink (allowed during fast days) or a foodstuff (not allowed during fast days), which would determine whether they could drink (or not eat) it during a fast.
God, make me good, but not yet.
The controversy was further inflamed by the murder of Don Bernardino de Salazar, bishop of Chiapas. Siding with the Dominicans, this Mexican bishop banned the drinking of chocolate in his church. The female congregants, pleading that it was necessary to prevent fainting spells during interminable masses, began to go to other parishes as a result. When the bishop retaliated by banning chocolate’s consumption across the diocese, one appropriately named Doña Magdalena de Morales took her revenge by sending him a cup of poisoned chocolate. Salazar fell ill and died shortly after.
Eventually, the Jesuitically inclined pope of the time, Alexander VII, favoured his own camp and through the means of a papal bull decreed that “Liquidum non frangit jejunum (liquids do not break the fast)”.
Chocolate’s association with fast-flouters was bad enough, but it continued as a vehicle for murder through the 18th century. Its sweet and strong taste was, after all, an ideal mask for poison. One of Frederick the Great’s valets is supposed to have tried to assassinate his master using it; Clement XIV was also suspected of being poisoned by drinking chocolate – unsurprisingly, his successors became suspicious of drinking it.
It wasn’t only death by chocolate that was a cause for concern: a shipment of Brazilian cacao paste – much of which was destined for monastic houses – docked at Cadiz and was found to be too heavy to unload. On inspection, the paste turned out to be chocolate-covered gold bars and coins. This may be the root of a popular Peruvian phrase “heavier on the stomach than Jesuit chocolate”.
Corruption was now added to the list of chocolate’s vices.
Post-reformation propaganda used sweet stuffs as symbols of Catholic excess and malfeasance. (It’s no wonder the Prods failed to wipe us out entirely.) Satire abounds of fat monks feasting on cakes and gorging on egg and cream-laden puddings. Prints satirising the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 are quick to use similar tropes: one depicts Daniel O’Connell and Pope Pius VIII as gormandisers gleefully carving up sections of an “Emancipation Pudding”, each of which is labelled. O’Connell poises his knife over “Seats in Parliament”; the Pope’s hangs over “Church Preferment”. The cake as a symbol of corruption is truly embedded in our psyche.
Outsiders see the Vatican’s association with saccharine delicacies as indicative of over-indulgence; the Church itself, however, seems to regard them solely as an innocent means to celebrate festivals throughout the year. A chocolate heart presented to one’s beloved could mark St Valentine’s day; a pancake on Shrove Tuesday finishes off any eggy or sugary temptation before Lent; Simnel cake offered a sweet respite in the Lenten fast on Mothering Sunday; chocolate in every possible form is gorged on Easter Sunday.
The Florentine artist Marina Calamai has painted these sugary punctuations marking the church year. Focusing largely on confections beloved by the Medicis, her oils are framed in daintily recreated Tuscan-style biscuit. The exhibition’s heart lies in the huge installation of a red rose and wild cherry cake, which when sliced produces a recording of Lorenzo the Magnificent reciting odes to the pursuit of pleasure. That is a modern interpretation of Lorenzo’s offerings, but one wonders if his illustrious descendants, Leo X, Clement VII, Pius IV or Leo XI, Medici popes all, indulged in similar cake-based whimsy.
The tradition of the papal sweet tooth continues to this day. John Paul is reported to have had crates of Yoohoo, a chocolate milk drink in the US, shipped back with him after his pontifical visit to Denver, Colorado. In 2014, Pope Francis was said to be delighted by a 1.5 tonne life-size statue of himself, presented to him by students of the Accademia dei Maestri Cioccolatieri. Master chocolatier Mirco della Vecchia spent a month carving the figure with a team of 30 students. Did Pope Francis’s famous sense of humour stoop to the greeting, “Nice to eat you”? one muses.
So naughty Dante may have a point – sweet confections have become symbols of supposed church corruption. But ultimately the Catholic church triumphs in that it has converted chocolate, puddings and all things sweet to its own cause: they are now the bread and butter of Christian public relations.
This article is from the December 2021 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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