The secret recipe of the jasmine chocolate of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo III is told in this video:
of the National Central Library of Florence on the YouTube channel of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism for the "Culture doesn't stop" campaign.
The short film starts from the citation of a volume of the Library, “Considerations on customs changed in the present century 1600 begin to notice from me, cav. Tommaso Rinuccini l'anno 1655”: a real change in the tastes of the Florentines who began to “drink chocolate according to the Spanish custom [...] in earthenware cups that seem to taste as hot as cold”.
With a sequence of images showing eighteenth-century illustrations of cocoa beans and plants, decorated cups and bars of chocolate taken, for example, from Officium Beate Mariae Virginis and Dissertation de Generation et metamorphosibus insectorum surinamensium by Maria Sibylla Merian, the narrative voice of Simona Mammana, a librarian, tells of the development in Florence, in the second half of the XNUMXth century, of a real chocolate industry and that the most prestigious and productive laboratory was that of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Cosimo III, in fact, also dedicated himself to experimentation: new recipes of which he was the jealous author, made with highly secret ingredients mixed with cocoa, which he wanted to keep with the Secret of State. It was only in 1712 that Francesco Redi, a “gentleman from Arezzo and an academic of the Crusca” revealed the very tasty recipe for jasmine chocolate, a laborious processing of cocoa powder, together with vanilla, cinnamon and fresh jasmine flowers lasting “ten twelve days”, with care to use moderate temperatures so as not to lose the scent of the petals in the drink.
