Tastes of Paradise

This ``social history of spices, stimulants and intoxications'' covers the Middle Ages to the modern era from the perch of an adroit and amiable Marxist sociology. For instance, at its European debut in the 17th-century coffeehouse, coffee officiated at the rise of the bourgeois technocrat; the brew's displacement from the coffeehouse to the home in the following century, the author argues, is a measure of the assimilation of bourgeois consciousness at the private hearth. Schivelbusch ( Disenchanted Night ) touches briefly on the pharmacological properties of coffee, chocolate, tea, tobacco, hashish, opium and alcoholic compounds, but his chief interest lies not in their chemical effect but in what society has construed them to do. The ``dry'' stimulant coffee was a prop or centerpiece in the bourgeois's sense of self; chocolate, associated with sensuality and taken while reclining, similarly served the aristocracy, until the engines of history relegated it to children. Although Schivelbusch is scholarly, he chooses not to burden us with reiterated evidence but to summarize the points of an apparently established record; his book is eloquent. Illustrations not seen by PW. (July)