DUFOUR Philippe Sylvestre Traitez Nouveaux & curieux du café, du thé et du chocolat. Ouvrage également nécessaire aux Medecins, & à tous ceux qui aiment leur santé.

Vicaire, 293 ; Bitting, 134 ; Mueller (Kaffee), p. 67 ; Maggs, Food & Drink (1937), n° 190 : “extremely scarce” ; Oberlé, Fastes, 733 ; NLM, 3481 ; Livres en bouche (BnF), 130 ; Alden, 685/56 ; see Arents (Add.), n° 492, pp. 462-464.

A very rare edition, the most complete. This work is one of the first to discuss the gastronomic and healing qualities of coffee, tea, and chocolate.

Part of the work was published in Lyon by the same booksellers in 1671 (see the Livres en bouche catalog, no. 129). The text was long attributed to the Lyon physician Jacob Spon, but it was his friend Dufour, or Du Four, who was responsible for this important treatise.

“Grand marchand originaire de Manosque, Du Four (vers 1322-1685) exerçait à Lyon un commerce international de drogues avec l’Orient et était par ailleurs, comme son ami Spon, un amateur de raretés et de curiosités. Son intérêt pour les boissons exotiques est donc à la fois celui du grand négociant et celui du grand curieux.”

In the 1671 edition, the treatise on chocolate was a reissue of Colmenero de Ledesma’s text (1643) translated by René Moreau, and the treatise on tea was a brief compilation of remarks taken from accounts of travels in the East. For this new edition of 1685, the author considerably revised and expanded the original work, thus providing “a greatly expanded version of the two treatises on tea and chocolate, and an entirely new text for the treatise on coffee. Du Four did not remove the medical discourse—which he even renewed where necessary, relying, for example, in the case of coffee, on a modern chemical analysis of the product—but he no longer accorded it such exclusive importance and showed much more curiosity than in 1671 about ways of preparing and consuming these products. He notes that chocolate is used in solid form in all kinds of sweets, that it is often drunk with ice cream in Italy, and that in France, gourmets prepare it not in water but in hot milk – adding an egg yolk, which I have never been able to stomach. Similarly, two chapters of the treatise on coffee are expressly devoted to the preparation of the drink, not without an ironic remark on the French habit of overusing sugar: instead of a coffee beverage, they make a “blackened water syrup” (see Livres en bouche, pp. 152-153).

“In the preface the author states that about 12 years previously a Latin  manuscript on coffee had been translated and printed by him, as coffee was becoming the mode. This work was so successful, all copies sold in less than a month, that after much research he wrote a new one to which he added discourses on tea and chocolate, the only thing in common with the Latin translation being the name, all else being original with himself” (Bitting).

Decorated with three beautiful copperplate engravings, two of which are included in the pagination—a person in Levantine dress and a Chinese man enjoying their drink, with coffee and tea plants—and a third outside the text: an American Indian “with his chocolate pot and cup” and “a branch from the cacao tree.” Vignette and opening letter at the beginning of each section.

Fine copy in its contemporary binding ; small occasional waterstain.

Provenance : Dr Maurice Villaret (bookplate).