
Hans Sloane: 18th Century Mixologist - pepys
http://recipes.hypotheses.org/7280
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manifold
His collections were also the basis for the founding of the British Museum
(which later split to also form both the Natural History Museum and British
Library), and he took over as president of the Royal Society from Newton.
Quite an amazing legacy.

~~~
benbreen
I agree, he's a very interesting figure. I was going to add that he invented
or at least popularized hot chocolate, but after looking into it a bit more it
turns out that the story is more complicated than I thought. Here's the
official narrative I'd heard (via the Natural History Museum):

"While in Jamaica, Sloane was introduced to cocoa as a drink favoured by the
local people. He found it 'nauseous' but by mixing it with milk made it more
palatable. He brought this chocolate recipe back to England where it was
manufactured and at first sold by apothecaries as a medicine.

Eventually, in the nineteenth century, it was being taken up by Messrs Cadbury
who manufactured chocolate using Sloane's recipe."

But this post from the Sloane Letters blog argues that it's basically a myth
(although it seems more accurate to say that the evidence is circumstantial at
best and that we don't really know what his role was, if any, in the 18th
century chocolate recipe that bore his name):

[http://www.sloaneletters.com/sloane-the-
chocolatier/](http://www.sloaneletters.com/sloane-the-chocolatier/)

