“Les suppositoires au chocolat” ont été inventés dans une pharmacie de Bordeaux
By Jonas Denis
Published on
Almost 300 years ago, the Fosse family produced in his pharmacye located today Alsace and Lorraine courses a Bordeaux (Gironde) from suppositories with cocoa butter as a base. You will obviously not find any more in the pharmacy today, but that has long been the case.
Yannick Srullani, at the helm of the pharmacy since 2015, knows the pharmacy’s past well. For good reason, before taking the dreams, he was able to exchange with the descendants of the Fosse family. “I can say that the suppositories, if they weren’t coated in chocolate, were indeed made with cocoa butter,” he exclaims amused.
A cocoa butter suppository
Cocoa butter was well used as an ingredient to coat the suppository. The reason ? “It was very useful, when it entered the human body, the heat made it melt and the medicine acted more quickly”, describes the pharmacist.
The melting temperature of cocoa butter corresponds to that of the human body, which is 37 degrees Celsius.
At that time, apothecaries sold a bit of everything and acted as much as a drugstore as a grocery store. Hence the presence of cocoa in the laboratories of the Fosse family
The pharmacy then extended to the corner of rue du Pas-Saint-Georges, where a Carhartt store is located today.
It’s not chocolate
Why is the origin of this invention not known? “I think it may have been kept secret,” the shopkeeper assumes.
Be that as it may, the absence of written documents on this famous recipe has given way to all sorts of legends around the creation of this suppository. “There has been a distortion of history. Some believe the suppository was coated in dark chocolate. It makes no sense,” he insists.
It was not the only invention of the Fosse family. “At the beginning of the 19th century, with the artichokes that they cultivated in their fields in Macau, the dynasty of pharmacists used the leaves for a preparation intended to detoxify the liver”, says Yannick Srullani.
To re-establish the link with the long history of the François pharmacy, the pharmacist decided to recover a recipe based on artichoke leaves. “We found a slightly different formula, but it does exist.”
But for now, the return of cocoa suppositories is not scheduled.
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