While the cacao illustration is one among a great many in his study, Sloane developed a special relationship to it, one that brings him nearly as much notoriety today as does his founding of the British Museum. As the story goes, like most travelers to the colonies, Sloane partook of the chocolate drink in Jamaica, but had an aversion to what he perceived to be its bitter taste. Legend has it that he added dairy to the brew to cut its bite, creating the first chocolate milk. The Sloane anecdote helped inaugurate a tradition of Europeans claiming to improve the bitter Mesoamerican drink by adapting it to their supposedly more refined taste. Scholars now consider these tales part and parcel of the general colonial pretension to civilizing the Tropics (see Delbourgo and Norton in the bibliography). In point of fact, the Aztecs sweetened their chocolate with honey and smoothed it with corn meal, in addition to adding a host of medically beneficial spices, many of which were enjoyed by Spanish and English colonists for generations. Those importing cacao for preparation in Europe logically sought alternatives to ingredients hard to find on the Continent, such as corn, and turned to what they had. As early as the 1660s, a treatise by Henry Stubbe and a witty dialogue by Bollicosgo Armuthaz recommended adding milk or egg, as a binding agent and for taste. While Sloane did not, therefore, invent the idea of adding a dairy product like milk to chocolate, his name did help the recipe garner press. Shrewd confectioners already began using Sloane’s notoriety to brand chocolate milk in the eighteenth century, and circa 1850, Cadbury printed “Sloane’s” recipe on its chocolate milk label, formalizing the connection. Like the historical illustrations of the tree, stories about chocolate tend to say as much about the interests of their teller as they do about the details of their subject.