Aciola

In The Physiology of Taste, after extolling the ne plus ultra concoction of chocolate (cocoa, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla), Brillat-Savarin goes on to enumerate other "adjuncts".

It is to this small number of substances that taste and experience have reduced the numerous ingredients which had been successively tried as adjuncts to cocoa, such as pepper, pimento, aniseed, ginger, aciola, and others.

Translated by Anne Drayton

"Aciola" is given as "aciole" in the French of the 1825 Physiologie du goût. Le Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé remarks that "aciole" does not appear in the standard dictionaries. It appears to be a coinage of Brillat-Savarin from the Latin aciola, a variation of acucula or acicula according to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae as cited by the Trésor.

The Trésor nicely translates the Latin back into French as "cerfeuil". Of the many plants that carry this name, one should note the "cerfeuil musqué" or Myrrhis odorata (sweet cicely) whose seeds like those of anise would be agreeable added to cocoa.

And so for day 1739
17.09.2011