The Frugality Commission, Collegium medicum, and the correspondents

The Frugality Commission was established in late 1744 with a far-reaching and intrusive scope; its purpose was to reduce the perceived growing opulence of the Swedish people. ^{Footnote 17} The importing of foreign luxuries was one of its key targets: estimates made by the body responsible for trade (Kommerskollegium) on behalf of the Commission suggested that the value of imported opulent goods equalled an amount of 5.2-million silver dollars, excluding textiles. ^{Footnote 18} This of course went against the founding principles of the economic theory that we traditionally label ‘mercantilism’.Footnote ¹⁹ And it is in this context that tea, coffee, and chocolate, together with sugar, tobacco, foreign alcoholic drinks, and spices, were identified as particularly troublesome goods.

Two approaches were taken in relation to coffee, tea, and chocolate, three beverages that early modern Europeans often grouped symbolically and rhetorically as representing different parts of the world.Footnote ²⁰ The first concentrated on fiscal measures, the result of which was a significantly higher consumer excise on the drinks introduced in 1747. ^{Footnote 21} The second was to turn to Collegium medicum and engage its members in a project to find substitutes. Established in 1663 as a guild for physicians, it became a state-sanctioned institution with responsibility for the national provision of health care in 1698. Collegium medicum was also the channel through which the state could communicate with physicians situated across Sweden and with professors in medical faculties. What the Commission now sought from these professionals was information on plants that could be turned into substitutes matching two objectives: firstly, they would ‘please the taste of the voluptuous’, and secondly, they would ‘conserve the health’ of the consumer. ^{Footnote 22}

In all, Collegium medicum received fourteen responses in 1745. ^{Footnote 23} In 1746 it published the results in a twelve-pages-long treatise that made it clear that the board members of the Collegium had redefined the remit of its original assignment.Footnote ²⁴ The publication makes no mention of substitutes for hot chocolate. Moreover, coffee substitutes are only discussed in one paragraph, and although some are listed, it is dismissive of the possibility of replacing imported coffee with local alternatives. What the treatise does contain is a list of tea substitutes (forty-five single-plant substitutes and ten blends) and a more than five-pages-long introduction. However, judging by the introduction, the Collegium did not even think the prospect of tea substitutes was very promising, arguing that it was more or less futile to resist either the power that ‘fashion’ had over the Swedish people or the irrational nature of mankind’s longing for ‘clothes and habits, food and drink’ from faraway. ^{Footnote 25} In this respect, we should read the treatise as part and parcel of the ongoing luxury debate, one in which those in charge of Collegium medicum were more pessimistic of the prospect of combating fashion than the Frugality Commission. ^{Footnote 26}

The published accounts were only part of the discourse, though. Even if some of the passages from the fourteen letters communicated to Collegium medicum include references to the ongoing public debate, they do also reveal a more engaged approach to the substitute projects, providing a distinct provincial perspective reflecting the authors’ geographical location. Many of them lived in small towns, varying in size from inland Örebro (1,864 inhabitants) to Gothenburg (8,000).Footnote ²⁷ In this context they represented a learned local elite who were able to make sensory evaluations of substitutes drawing on their experience of consuming imported coffee and tea. But they were also influenced by their surroundings; the large swaths of forests and farmland surrounding their home towns, areas that the correspondents were often tasked to traverse in order to cater to the needs of the largely rural population. As we shall see, their substitute proposals – what raw materials they suggested or reported on – were also to a large degree shaped by these ecologies and the people who inhabited them. Many of the substitute recipes provided in the letters were in fact already in use. These local versions of coffee and tea were not framed by concerns raised within the fields of political economy; rather, they represented what people used when they could not afford – or, equally if not more importantly, could not access – exotic goods. As we shall see, the raw materials used for the substitute(s) were limited to what could be harvested or foraged on farms and among households which supplied most of what they consumed themselves. The assumption is that ingredients they chose to use matched ideas of what imported tea and coffee should look, taste, feel and smell like, and that this rural ‘cosmopolitan sensibility’ was more widely circulated than the (imported) goods themselves.Footnote ²⁸

The fact that we can capture these notions of what coffee and tea meant to early modern Swedes, albeit interpreted and codified by Collegium medicum correspondents, and can situate them in their local environments or ecologies, makes the fourteen letters a unique type of source material. In addition to this material, the article also draws on a selection of printed texts, most importantly Linnaeus’s two articles, ‘Notes on tea and tea drinking’ (1746) and ‘Notes on coffee’ (1747) printed in Olav. Peter. Hiorter’s Almanac, a cheap annual print with a large popular range.Footnote ²⁹

Policies, plants, and processes – substitutions in early modern history

The above discussion suggests that we need to consider substitutes from three different perspectives: the local context, the medical practitioners, and the state, the latter represented by the Frugality Commission. Historians have been interested in the effects of state policies and the economic role of substitutes on a long-term basis. A famous example from the early modern period is the restriction on imports of colourful piece goods from South Asia, set in place to protect the English wool industry, which promoted the development of new textile-printing technologies and eventually also new spinning and weaving mechanisms. The well-known end result was a domestic industry geared towards the mass production of standardized goods for a global market. In combination with the expansion of the British Empire, the Indian peninsula was reduced from being a manufacturer of cotton fabrics to an exporter of raw cotton.Footnote ³⁰ This result was obviously not foreseen by those instigating the initial import bans in Britain, and nothing in the remaining archive material of the Frugality Commission suggests that its members thought beyond the need to reduce imports when they came up with the substitution scheme. Among the other actors at the forefront here, it was only Linnaeus who envisioned any major changes to the world economy, although, as we shall see below, in his case they were the imagined result of plant transfer – of bringing a live tea shrub from China to Sweden – rather than of inventing a substitute. For the medical practitioners and local inventors of tea and coffee replacements we find other and much more specific meanings and practices, which need different historiographies than those concerned with political economy and factory technology to come to the fore. In the next two sections I will first draw on the history of medicine and botany, where the focus is on a substitute as a material, as a noun. I will then move on to talk about the act of substituting as a verb and as a process – drawing on histories of trade skills – of experimentation, and as a form of commodity indigenization.

Substitution in early modern medicine and natural history

When coffee and tea arrived in Europe in the seventeenth century they were presented as medicines; medicine is also important framework for understanding the extent to which different substances could replace one another. Within this field, and dating back to antiquity, a series of practices and theories had evolved that was concerned with how to replace hard-to-get ingredients from across the Eurasian continent, used in what were often complex medicines involving a large number of components. Thought experiments such as ‘analogy’, ‘abstraction’, and ‘induction’ helped guide the manufacturing of drugs. Later on, specific disciplines, including natural history, and theories for identifying species and determining to which genera they belonged, influenced substitution practices as well.Footnote ³¹ As knowledge of the natural world expanded – not least in the wake of the European colonization of America, but also as Europe became divided into states with greater or lesser access to the New World – substitution theories emerged which promoted the more systematic replacement of exotic ingredients with locally grown ones. While physio-theological thinking reinforced this approach – local plants cured local bodies and God would not have distributed wealth unevenly across the world, so the argument went – the rationale for substitution here was also an economic one. It was cheaper to harvest materia medica at home rather than import it. ^{Footnote 32} The latter argument was also used in other contexts, particularly in the production of medicine for poor sections of society. ^{Footnote 33}

The theories and practices at the heart of medicine substitutes are evident in how Collegium medicum’s correspondents approached the project to find substitutes for coffee and tea. Many used Succedaneum, the Latin term predominantly applied in medical contexts when referring to substitutes in their letters. ^{Footnote 34} At the time, Swedish medicine was to no small extent influenced by Dutch developments: many early modern Swedish physicians studied in the Netherlands as part of their education.Footnote ³⁵ It was also within the sphere of Dutch-educated Cartesian medicine that the new exotic beverages received their warmest endorsements.Footnote ³⁶ Most famous is the late seventeenth-century physician Cornelis Bontekoe, who presented tea as the panacea for every form of ill-health, recommending quantities of up to 200 cups a day.Footnote ³⁷ As we shall see below, the connection between health and tea continued to be important in the development of tea substitutes in Sweden.

The Dutch Republic, and the developments which took place within its empire, was important in another respect too, and one which had direct bearing on the substitute project: the prospect of transferring plants. The game-changer in this story was the transplanting of the coffee plant from the Middle East to Asia (Java), and then to the West Indies/Latin America around 1700. To Linnaeus, who spent three years in the Dutch Republic, this shift in the geography of the production of coffee was highly influential for his plans to start tea plantations in Sweden. How ‘the happy Arabia’ had lost its natural monopoly to Europeans, who brought with them coffee plants to their Asian as well as their American colonies, was analogous to how Linnaeus envisioned robbing the Chinese of their tea monopoly. ^{Footnote 38} Tea, unlike coffee, could grow in Sweden, Linnaeus was sure: he envisioned huge plantations and huge profits from the move. While this would famously become a pet project of Linnaeus, one to which he returned many times, it is worth pointing out that it was particularly high on his agenda in the mid-1740s. In his letter to Collegium medicum from October 1745, Linnaeus refers to his plans to send one of his students, Pehr Kalm, on a journey across the Eurasian continent, intending to bring back seeds/seedlings from a tea shrub. ^{Footnote 39} The advantage of the caravan route was that it did not cross the equator, something which was thought to have a detrimental effect on plants carried onboard ships. Collegium medicum, probably under the influence of Linnaeus’s best friend Abraham Bäck, who at the time had only recently joined the board, supported the idea by mentioning it in its interim report to the Frugality Commission in the summer of 1746. ^{Footnote 40}

In light of the above plans, it comes as no surprise that Linnaeus had mixed feelings towards the idea of tea substitution within the context of the assignment with which Collegium medicum had been burdened. That he praised Walhborg’s tea substitute in his travel account from 1747 probably only reflects the obligation he felt towards those who tasked him with doing an inventory of useful nature in the Swedish provinces, and towards those who paid for his journey, the Swedish Estates (Riksdag).Footnote ⁴¹ What is interesting in the case of the project that Collegium medicum now was in charge of is the taxonomic argument that Linnaeus brought to the table to refute the possibility of finding a successful tea substitute. In a letter to Collegium medicum he wrote: ‘As far as it is concerned, it is undisputed that throughout Europe we have no plant, which with the tea itself is in some kind of relationship, that we can thus by no means achieve a genuine Succedaneum.’ ^{Footnote 42} Notable here is the reference to the lack of plants taxonomically related to the tea plant, i.e. belonging to the same genera, something which it was suggested was a pre-condition for a plant becoming a ‘genuine’ substitute. In the case of coffee substitutes, we can find a similar logic in Linnaeus’s approach; he argued that Lonicera xylosteum and Caprifolium were the closest relatives to the coffee plant, but he dismissed the possibility of using their fruits, seeds, or kernels as coffee substitutes since it was not possible to process them like coffee beans. ^{Footnote 43}

Returning to the question of whether the European flora contained any species related to tea, this was a contested issue. In Flora Lapponica, published in 1737, Linnaeus discusses the Danish seventeenth-century naturalist Simon Pauli’s suggestion that Myrica gale, Bot-myrtle (Porss in Swedish), was a relative of the tea plant, something Linnaeus dismisses as ‘crazy fantasies’. ^{Footnote 44} Pauli’s claim (his name for the same plant was Thee europaeum) was nonetheless taken up and revised by one of the provincial physicians corresponding with Collegium medicum, Johan Hesselius, who was stationed in the town of Örebro. He argued that there had been some confusion, and that the plant referred to as Thee europaeum was different to the Swedish Porss, which Hesselius describes with some disdain (most notably because it was used by farmers as a substitute to hops, as it had an intoxicating effect). Pauli’s Thee europaeum was an altogether different species, with leaves that ‘looked’ like the ‘leaves of East India tea’, and which when infused in water had a notable ‘power’, Hesselius argued. ^{Footnote 45}

We shall return to Hesselius’s advice for preparing tea from Thee europaeum later on; for now, it is important to note that, while Linnaeus was ‘more right’ than Hesselius, the latter reached his conclusions in ways that were similar to Linnaeus – by comparing leaves from native plants with the look of the leaves in the finished product sold as tea. It is also worth highlighting that the identity of the tea plant, today Camellia sinensis, was debated throughout the eighteenth century; Linnaeus changed the names he allotted to the plant, at one point (in 1762) distinguishing between two tea species (Thea Bohea and Thea Virids), i.e. by using a distinction central to the commerce in tea to separate them.

Aside from a taxonomy informed by commerce, geography and theology played a crucial role in defining substitutions; Pauli/Hesselius framed their tea candidate by drawing on Europe as an entity. Others, like Johannes Phil, based in Visby on the Baltic island of Gotland, referred to ‘indigenous Succedanea’ – the opposite of ‘foreign goods’. ^{Footnote 46} Both he and Herman Spöring, Professor of Medicine at Åbo Academy, used the term succedanea to refer to a wide range of domestic plants that could serve this role, many of which were well-known medicinal plants, such as the members of the Veronica family. ^{Footnote 47} Spöring’s comment in this context – that, ‘As experience carefully attest… herbs that grow in our climate are more useful to our bodies… than those prescribed from far-flung places at great expense’ – is telling. ^{Footnote 48} We recognize the physio-theological framework dating back to the seventeenth and even sixteenth centuries common particularly among medics and natural historians operating in areas of Europe with little access to drugs imported from the New World. ^{Footnote 49} In a move that we can read as both opportunistic and strategic Linnaeus suggests using twinflowers (Linnea borealis) as a tea substitute in his letter to Collegium medicum. Here he argues that not only does the plant produce a healthy brew, but also that it is so rare in ‘Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Geneva’ that the latter countries would never be able to sell ‘one single pound’ of it. ^{Footnote 50} It is possible that by suggesting using the leaves of his signature plant, Linnaeus sought to demonstrate an allegiance with the substitute project on a general level. Taking this stance, he could lend credibility to what at this time was his main objective, to import tea plants or seeds from China via the land route, with the intention to start production at home.Footnote ⁵¹

Substitutions as imitation, the result of experimentation, and commodity indigenization

Sourcing raw material for substitutions did involve drawing on academic scholarship. The next step, the processing of the material for it to pass as coffee or tea, required using different types of knowledge, which has been the object of study in various fields of history. To economic historians concerned with the imported substitution of durable goods, the act of imitation has predominantly, for example, been discussed in relation to artisanal knowledge and skill, as a form of ‘useful knowledge’. Skilful copying was a celebrated talent among artists and tradespeople in the eighteenth century. It could involve decorative designs but also the imitation of surfaces of expensive goods, such as that of lacquer ware. ^{Footnote 52}

We recognize a similar approach to the substitute project among Collegium medicum’s correspondents. For example, Nils Retzius, a provincial physician from the county of Skåne, in the south of Sweden, discuss the possibility of ‘imitating’ coffee and ‘representing’ cacao in his letter. ^{Footnote 53} As will be shown below, visual similarity was a very important quality of tea and coffee substitutes. But the application of skills in the process of making the substitute mattered too. Discussing tea substitutes, Jacob Boëthius, city physician in Gothenburg, writes that leaves and herbs could ‘uppfinnas’, a word which could mean both ‘being invented’ and/or ‘being found’. ^{Footnote 54} Johan Hesselius, meanwhile, underlined the need for making many ‘diligent attempts’ as the key for success. ^{Footnote 55} To substitute did thus involve experimentation, which historians of early modern science have shown meant drawing on resources and equipment at home, in the household, and more specifically the kitchen. ^{Footnote 56} Moreover, it did, as historical research on recipes also has demonstrated, mean engaging with knowledge typically held by women.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is hence not surprising that Retzius in his letter suggests that ‘inventive women’ were best placed to develop substitutes.Footnote ⁵⁸ Since the processing of the substitutes took place in the kitchen we can deduce that women were there; occasionally they are also mentioned in the correspondence, as in Hesselius’s discussion of a coffee substitute he had served up, which he instructed ‘noble and sensible women’ to ‘manufacture’.Footnote ⁵⁹

In this respect the story bears some principal similarities to the process of how drinking chocolate was introduced into the diet of the Spanish colonizers in Latin America, and then how the habit spread. In the foreground here were indigenous women who married or worked as servants in the households of the colonizers. These forms of chocolate preparation and consumption then moved across the Atlantic, and became incorporated into European Iberian culture. Once established, and in response to fears of creolization, drinking chocolate was reframed with the help of medical theories and new ingredients, something which also came to mean that the agents involved in transferring indigenous knowledge were written out of the history.Footnote ⁶⁰ The case helps us to understand the need to focus on the agents in the kitchens, but also on how exotic goods circulated among different networks.

The uptake of tobacco consumption in early modern Europe is another illuminating example of how one culture responds to and absorbs a new commodity, a process which has been described as ‘commodity indigenization’.Footnote ⁶¹ The early and widespread use of this Atlantic crop in the Nordic countries – by the beginning of the eighteenth century smoking was common in Sweden – does also help us to detect an important circumstance: since tobacco plants could be cultivated there, they could be incorporated into the self-sufficient household’s production and consumption.Footnote ⁶² This brings us back to the local perspective, and to those whose recipes and practises Collegium medicum’s correspondents codified. Their substitutes can, for want of a better word, be understood as a form of ‘proxy commodity indigenization’. As I shall show below, producing them involved making use of different kinds of local raw materials which were processed in a similar way to the imported goods, and with the aim of creating imitations of exotic beverages.

With this in mind, let us turn to the various raw material and processing technologies discussed in the letters. Since they differed depending on which beverage was being imitated, the tea and coffee substitutes will be discussed separately in the following two sections.

Foraging, rolling, and roasting tea

What was tea to early modern Swedes? Like Linnaeus in the introductory quote, Boëthius in Gothenburg refers to ‘The Bohe’ as the prototype in his advice on substitution, ^{Footnote 63} as does Olof Kalmeter, the physician to the copper mine in Falun and Linnaeus’s brother-in-law, who mentions both ‘The de Boe’ and ‘green tea’ as reference points in his tea substitute recipes. ^{Footnote 64} Bohea tea was by far the most common tea imported from China to Europe in the eighteenth century, a trade that was growing exponentially, not least because it gave rise to lucrative illegal dealings. The recently established Swedish East India Company’s imports were largely re-exported and eventually smuggled into Britain, which was the biggest consumer of tea in Europe.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, and as Hesselius’s remark pays witness to, Chinese tea did also spill over into the Swedish market. Hesselius noted that it could be found in merchants’ stalls across the country.Footnote ⁶⁶ Collegium medicum makes a similar point in its print treatises, claiming that even among poorer people tea had become common.Footnote ⁶⁷ Likewise Linnaeus begins his Almanac text ‘Notes on tea and tea-drinking’ by stating that ‘Tea (Thea) is a Chinese and Japanese drink, which now is not only common in Sweden, but a lot across Europe.’Footnote ⁶⁸ While such statements are hearsay, and while it is hard to trace the actual consumption of imported tea in Sweden, they do suggest a popular awareness of the beverage.

How then to turn this global commodity of Chinese origin into a local one; what did it imply? We can think about it as a process that involved several stages, and which took place in different spaces. The kitchen garden was one; however, it is notable that very few plants suggested by Collegium medicum’s correspondents were cultivated. If we use the treatise published by Collegium medicum as a summary, we note that only five of forty-five plants listed there (hyssop, sage, mint, lemon balm, and red roses) were cultivated. Instead, the substitute tea leaves were to a large extent foraged. And those foraged were to no small extent plants with a history of being used in medicine, as in the case with germander speedwell. Hesselius, who recommended ‘Veronica med.’ (probably Veronica chamadrys), advised searching ‘in old swede-fields and elsewhere in the forest [where it] grows quite abundantly.’ ^{Footnote 69} Similarly, Linnaeus recommended looking for twinflower leaves in ‘large and extensive forests, especially where the forests are old and shady’. ^{Footnote 70} Additional advice was made on when to forage. Phil in Visby recommended collecting germander speedwell around midsummer, and Kalmeter in Falun suggested gathering nettles in the spring. Gustaf Fredrik Voigtlender, stationed in Gävle, advised that leaves from red clover were best gathered in the middle of the day when they had been ‘blown free’ (of dew). ^{Footnote 71}

Turning to the next step in the processing of tea substitutes it is possible to detect a more direct Chinese influence, although mediated by visiting Europeans, who noted down their observations on tea.Footnote ⁷² Johannes Phil provides a detailed description of how to make ‘Chinese tea’ from germander speedwell. The step-by-step account included washing the leaves and ‘drying them in small “bouquets on a string” until they “wilt”’, after which the leaves are ‘somewhat dried’ in a clean pan, on a low heat, using a wooden stick to stir. Next, the leaves are poured on to a clean cloth on top of a table, and rolled ‘together like tea’, after which again the leaves are to be put in a pan, ‘to dry a little, but with caution not to burn them’. After rolling them a second time (optional), they are left to dry covered by paper. The tea can then be stored together with ‘some leaves of lemon balm’ in thin boxes. ^{Footnote 73} The attention to detail, including the rolling of the tea, is reminiscent of Linnaeus’s description of Walhborg’s tea, quoted at the beginning of this article.

Similar descriptions are repeated in other contexts too. In Linnaeus’s article ‘Notes on tea and tea drinking’, from 1746, he describes the process of making tea in China. He explains that roasting the leaves (while they still can ‘secrete’ liquid), and rolling them helps to extract some of the harmful substances which otherwise could cause ‘perplexity’ to the brain and make the consumer ‘giddy’. ^{Footnote 74} Although less detailed, in his letter Hesselius likewise links the ‘laborious preparation’ of tea leaves in China with the need to suppress their ‘harmful narcotic power’. ^{Footnote 75} In the case of the Swedish substitutes, it seems, however, that the process of roasting and rolling fulfilled no other function than to produce a good which was visibly similar to Chinese tea before use. The look of the brewed substitution tea mattered too. Peter Platin, from Jönköping, who like Phil favoured the use of germander speedwell, suggested pre-boiling the leaves ahead of drying them, something which, once infused, would produce a tea with a ‘beautiful yellow-green colour’. ^{Footnote 76} Hesselius, who promoted Thee europaeum as a tea substitute, did likewise, explaining that the leaves took on a colour ‘almost like … foreign tea’ after having been soaked and dried as part of the preparation process. ^{Footnote 77}

It is worth noting that the term ‘infusion’ is used interchangeably with the term ‘tea’ by the Collegium medicum correspondents when they discuss the results of their work. ^{Footnote 78} A closer look at the historic use of these terms in Swedish reveals interesting overlaps. One of the earliest uses of infusion in Swedish is in a husbandry book from late seventeenth-century Sweden, describing how to make two types of violet syrups: ‘Violet syrup’ and ‘Violet syrup per Infusion’. The first one involved blending violet flowers with melted sugar, the other leaving water and flowers under hot ash for twenty-four hours, then straining the mixture, then boiling it again. ^{Footnote 79} By the 1740s the term infusion seems to have become intrinsically linked to tea, at least in scholarly contexts such as in the Swedish chemist Johan Gottschalk Wallerius’s taxonomy of water types published in 1748 (Vatturiket). Here the Swedish chemists use (Chinese) tea as an example of the ‘sub spices’ ‘Infusa’. This was a liquid produced by ‘pouring boiling water over a herb to obtain its inner power, the result is a thin and clear liquid.’ ^{Footnote 80} Anecdotal evidence suggests that the term infusion almost disappears from use thereafter, at least in publications providing simple medical advice involving hot water and herbs. Here the term tea is much more common instead. ^{Footnote 81} Why is hard to tell: perhaps it was the result of the status that Chinese tea had in the seventeenth century as a medicine, as well as the growing popularity of tea – or at least warm beverages in which water was the main ingredient – in the eighteenth century.

Harvesting, burning, milling, and boiling coffee

If we know that the tea imported into Europe almost exclusively came from China, the origin of coffee beans was far more elusive. Among Collegium medicum’s correspondents only one letter, that by Johan Fjellström, Navy physician in Karlskrona, points to a place: it was the ‘coffee bean from the Levant’ that he sought to replace with local acorns. ^{Footnote 82} To this we can also add a piece Linnaeus wrote in 1747: ‘Notes on coffee’ printed in Olav. Peter. Hiorter’s Almanac. Here he states that ‘Levantine coffee beans … although in size they are the smallest, yet in power, they are estimated to be the best.’ ^{Footnote 83} Nonetheless, given the growing dominance of slave-produced plantation coffee from the West Indies and Java in Amsterdam, from where merchants bought most of the coffee imported to Sweden (73% in 1738), we can assume there was little Levantine coffee in Sweden in the 1740s. Assuming the Amsterdam share was the same in 1745 as in 1738, the total Swedish import amounted to 12,366 pounds or 5.3 tons of coffee beans.Footnote ⁸⁴ More coffee did probably arrive as smuggled goods: a recent study shows that such business was rife in the second half of the century. ^{Footnote 85}

Raw coffee beans needed to be processed before they could be made into a brew, something which was also the case with substitutes suggested to Collegium medicum. The first step – what we today call roasting – was, however, a problematic process, at least to Linnaeus, who in his letter to Collegium medicum writes: ‘foremost in coffee is the burnt Empyreumatic oil’ which was not conducive to ‘conserving health’. ^{Footnote 86} Health concerns relating to coffee are expressed by the other correspondents too, and although they do not point to the roasting process it seems likely that they too perceived the latter as problematic. ^{Footnote 87} Nonetheless, almost all of them propose substitutes to replace imported coffee, which needed to be roasted, suggesting the influence of already established practices.

As Table 1 shows, what was suggested was a variety of grains, with barley coming out as the top seed, followed by wheat, rye, and oats. Different types of beans and peas were also common. In contrast to tea substitutes, it becomes abundantly clear that most coffee replacements were grown; they matched what was local staple agricultural goods at the time. One cannot but notice that uncrushed grains, as well as beans and peas, are similar in shape and size to what we can assume the unroasted coffee beans sold in Sweden would have looked like.

Table 1:

Coffee substitutes

Sources: Letters to Collegium medicum, Inkomna handlingar, Allmänna serie, 1741–50, E2:7, Collegium medicum’s Archive, Riksarkivet, Stockholm.

Morphological affinity was a principle in the substitution of medicines going back to antiquity. Acorns, one wild produce that three physicians recommended, do also have certain resemblances, ^{Footnote 88} as do hazelnuts (but perhaps not juniper berries), although it is worth pointing out that they were both suggested by one correspondent only (Hesselius), who admittedly had not tested them. ^{Footnote 89} It is worth noting that two of the other ‘wild’ candidates, seeds from Caprifolium, and Lonicera, were recommended by Linnaeus because of their perceived close relationship with Coffea arabica, although he subsequently ruled them out because they ‘are so small that it is impossible to benefit from them’. ^{Footnote 90}

We recognize Linnaeus’s botanical framework for substitution; his dismissal of certain substitutes is, however, also of interest as it points to the central role of roasting. Arguably, to mimic this process, the substitutes needed to be of a certain size. How to roast or ‘burn’ the substitute is also discussed in the letters. Platin describes how he made coffee from ‘good barely’, a process which involved washing and drying the corn, ‘burning’ it in ‘an iron pot’, while ‘constantly being stirred’. Once ground, he recommended mixing in a ‘tiny’ amount of cinnamon. ^{Footnote 91} Voigtlender describes likewise how he parboiled broad beans (bondbönor) ‘lightly’, after which he let them dry ‘well’ until they were hard again, then ‘burned them moderately (‘lagom’), like other coffee beans’. Once ground he mixed 3 lod (e.g. 3 x 13.28 gram) of the coffee substitute with 1 stop (1.3 litre) of water and boiled it, producing a ‘clear’ coffee. ^{Footnote 92}

To sum up, the variety of similar-sized local produce which could be easily processed like coffee beans, a process that took place in the kitchen, and which crucially involved roasting, suggests that the agricultural context and self-sufficiency of households were central contexts for the uptake of coffee substitutions, and for the development of cosmopolitan sensibilities among the rural population.

Psychoactive sensations and taste

Finally, then, what did the substitutes taste like? And what about their perceived effects on the body? Beginning with the last question, we must first recognize that Collegium medicum’s correspondents referred to coffee and tea as potent medicines that could have detrimental as well as beneficial effects. As Linnaeus puts it in his Almanac article on coffee in 1747: ‘No plant is so harmful that it cannot be used as a good medicine’, an argument that was common among physicians in early modern Europe.Footnote ⁹³ Here and in the text on tea from the previous year’s Almanac he acknowledges that both beverages could be used to good effect, such as taking the edge off hangovers and reducing bloatedness.Footnote ⁹⁴ In addition, tea could dampen fevers and combat diseases that ‘tensed the fibres in the body’, while coffee worked against headaches, obesity, and worms; it was also a means by which to ‘wake up’, and it ‘provoked mirth’ in those ‘who have good food but no work’.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, taken in too large quantities both beverages gave rise to sleeplessness, trembling limbs, impotence, hysteria, anxiety, burping etc.; symptoms that were part and parcel of the critical discourse surrounding coffee as well as tea in the early modern period.Footnote ⁹⁶

It was not only by the men of medicine that the side effects of the new beverages were discussed. The Frugality Commission also warned of the ‘ailments’ resulting from the over-consumption of the new beverages as one of the (admittedly several) reasons for why the state should steer its subjects away from them.Footnote ⁹⁷ The latter discussion is likely to have formed an important backdrop to why the Commission turned to Collegium medicum in requesting it to find substitutes that could ‘conserve the health’ of the people. ^{Footnote 98} The association between what we might call the psychoactive effects of caffeine and ill health, as well as the remit to find healthy alternatives, do probably explain why most of Collegium medicum’s correspondents refrained from discussing the extent to which their substitutes could affect the body in a similar way to imported coffee and tea. One exception is Hesselius, who, when discussing Pauli’s Thee europaeum, refers both to the latter’s statement that this European tea had a ‘power’ similar to tea from China and to his own (i.e. Hesselius’s) experiments making tea from the plant, also then detecting its ‘power’.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, it is noteworthy that the psychoactive effect is highlighted as part of a taxonomic argument, rather than – or at least not only as – an argument in favour of a certain substitute.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Hesselius’s tea stands out in another respect, too: it was to be consumed with sugar just like ‘other tea’, which would give it a ‘pleasant’ taste. Sugar (or honey)-induced sweetness is otherwise notably absent from the discourse, something which needs further investigation but which coincides with the comparably low imports of sugar into Sweden in the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Only by the second third of the nineteenth century did sugar imports reach a level that suggests ‘mass-consumption’.Footnote ¹⁰²

Regarding the question of taste; as the Frugality Commission indirectly acknowledged when they turned to Collegium medicum and the community it represented, the Collegium correspondents were not only experts in medicine and botany, but also comprised a group who knew taste. What they were delegated to do was to identify substitutes that would ‘please the taste of the voluptuous’, phrasing that suggests two definitions of taste, much in line with current studies of the multiple meaning of the term in the eighteenth century. ^{Footnote 103} One typically refers to a form of politeness, a reflection of cultivation, education, or cosmopolitan experience; the other refers to taste in the gustatory sense of the word. The latter, together with scent, was often ranked below sight, hearing, and touch in scholarly explorations of the world, something which might help us interpret the somewhat limited vocabulary used in evaluating the taste of substitution, a question to which I return below. ^{Footnote 104}

Both meanings of the word taste can be detected in the material. Examples of the first instance are when Collegium medicum’s correspondents distinguish between on one hand those with ‘delicate taste’, ^{Footnote 105} or ‘delicate pruriency’ ^{Footnote 106} , ‘the voluptuous’ (‘läckergom’ or ‘läcker’), ^{Footnote 107} the ‘lovers’ of e.g. coffee, ^{Footnote 108} or ‘good Coffee knowers’; ^{Footnote 109} and on the other side their opposites, those with ‘less delicious and delicate taste’. ^{Footnote 110} Reading between the lines it is clear that the correspondents thought that habits educated the palate of the consumer. But even those with experience could be fooled. No fewer than five of Collegium medicum’s correspondents refer to such situations. ^{Footnote 111} Kalmeter, for example, writes:

Kalmeter’s testimony is quite generic, and it might be read as a trope, a critique of what Hesselius called ‘imagined taste’. ^{Footnote 113} However, evidence based on personal experience is also offered. Johan Rothman, provincial physician and lecturer at the local gymnasium in Växjö (where he had taught the young Linnaeus), claimed to have misled two ‘good coffee connoisseurs’ by serving them substitute coffee. ^{Footnote 114} Fjellström even acknowledged that he had wrongly assumed he had been served second-rate (but genuine) coffee, while in fact it was a substitute. ^{Footnote 115} It is worth pointing out that in none of the five cases do the correspondents refer to the psychoactive reaction, or lack thereof, in their description of responses to the consumption of substitute coffee. Fooled or not, what is clear is that it was the taste of Collegium medicum’s correspondents that formed the benchmark, or, as Gustaf Zimmerman, the provincial physician in Skaraborgs län in western Sweden, put it as he concluded his long list of tea substitute teas he had tried out: ‘All these I have tried [out] and with regards to my taste [been] pleased with.’ ^{Footnote 116}

Taste is also referred to as the second sense, and in relation to the substitutes; here the imported goods form the benchmark. The taste of the substitutes is sometimes referred to as ‘almost like’, ^{Footnote 117} or it can ‘pass for’, ^{Footnote 118} be not ‘indifferent from’, ^{Footnote 119} or ‘close to’, ^{Footnote 120} or simply ‘like’. ^{Footnote 121} Occasionally, a substitute is improved by adding ingredients; Kalmeter recommended blending flowers from clove pink (Dianthus caryophyllus, [?], and daisy (Bellis perennis) to give the tea a ‘high delectable’ taste. ^{Footnote 122} This was, however, an exception: Collegium medicum’s correspondents did not generally ‘compose’ taste and scent impressions; they were not inventive in this respect. Also, they used adjectives in a sparse and general manner when evaluating the results of their experiments with their own or others’ recipes. Most common are more nondescript words such as ‘pleasant’ (‘behaglig’) and ‘enjoyable’ (‘angenäm’); all in all, twenty terms are used for evaluating.Footnote ¹²³ What this means is hard to tell; different fields of early modern scholarship had a more or less developed vocabulary for distinguishing tastes and scents.Footnote ¹²⁴ While Collegium medicum’s correspondents were medical experts, and while they thought about themselves as being in possession of taste (as a reflection of their cultivation), they were not equipped to evaluate taste in the same sense as a broker, wholesaler, or retailer of exotic goods.

So what conclusions can we draw about the cosmopolitan sensibilities among the rural population at large? Outside the realms of medicine and of elite consumers who could afford to expose themselves to the perceived risk of consuming too much tea or coffee (and thus perhaps familiarizing themselves with the psychoactive and physical side effects to a greater extent), we might tentatively conclude that much could pass as coffee (in particular) in early modern Sweden. And we can say that, consequently, there was little consensus about how it ought to taste; it did not even need to be sweet. Perhaps what mattered most was that drinks were amber or brown and hot?