A strong cup of coffee may be the cure you need in the morning to wake up and begin working, but in Mozart's time it was thought to also cure stomach ailments.
Hot chocolate, besides being delicious, was thought to make your blood vessels stronger.
"Remember, this is a time before there was medicine," says Colorado pianist Katie Mahan. "So there were a lot of homeopathic treatments and it was believed that chocolate was really good to make strong blood vessels."
Mahan says that Mozart liked both coffee and hot chocolate, but his favorite drink was warm almond milk. "In those days there wasn't central heating and so the apartments were quite cold. And with this cold apartments many people developed hemorrhoids." Mahan says the common treatment was warm almond milk.
Mozart's favorite place to have warm almond milk, and shoot a game of billiards, was Café Staiger, now known as Café Tomaselli. Katie takes us to Café Tomaselli where you can order "Mozart's Mandelmilch" in this latest edition of Mozart Snapshots.
Katie Mahan is a Denver native and now lives in Salzburg. Each week she takes on a new journey of walking in Mozart's footsteps to where he lived, worked, socialized and more. See more Mozart Snapshots episodes, and check back each week for a new episode!
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