Snuff (tobacco)
[1] Typical traditional flavors are varieties of blended tobacco leaves considered original "fine snuff" without any addition of scents or essences.
[1] Common flavors also include coffee, chocolate, bordeaux, honey, vanilla, cherry, orange, apricot, plum, camphor, cinnamon, rose and spearmint.
[2] Large snuff containers, called mulls (made from a variety of materials, notably including rams' horns decorated with silver), were usually kept on the table.
Recent practice has been for this tradition to be maintained at the principal doorkeeper's personal expense due to smoking in the House being banned since 1693.
It is subject to the same sale and purchase age restrictions as with other tobacco products in accordance with local laws.
[27] The resulting snuff was then stored in airtight ornate bone bottles or tubes to preserve its flavor for later consumption.
[27] Snuff-taking by the Taino and Carib people of the Lesser Antilles was observed by the Franciscan friar Ramón Pané on Columbus' second voyage to the New World in 1493.
[27][29] Catherine was so impressed with its curative relieving properties, she promptly declared the tobacco would henceforth be termed Herba Regina (Queen Herb).
[27] Prominent snuff users included Pope Benedict XIII who repealed the smoking ban set by Pope Urban VIII; Queen Anne; King George III's wife Queen Charlotte, referred to as 'Snuffy Charlotte', who had an entire room at Windsor Castle devoted to her snuff stock; and King George IV, who had his own special blends and hoarded a stockpile of snuff.
[1][27] Napoleon, Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Marie Antoinette, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Disraeli all used snuff, as well as numerous other notable persons.
[1][27] The taking of snuff helped to distinguish the elite members of society from the common people, who generally smoked their tobacco.
[30] It was also during the 18th century that an English author and botanist, John Hill, concluded nasal cancer could develop with the use of snuff.
Under the guise of a doctor, he reported five cases of "polyps, a swelling in the nostril adherent with the symptoms of open cancer".
[27][31] In Victorian era Britain, a few miracle "snake oil" claims on the health or curative benefits of certain snuff types surfaced in publications.
For instance, a London weekly journal called The Gentlewoman advised readers with ailing sight to use the correct type of Portuguese snuff, "whereby many eminent people had cured themselves so that they could read without spectacles after having used them for many years".
[citation needed] Snuff's image as an aristocratic luxury attracted the first U.S. federal tax on tobacco, created in 1794.
In addition, orally chewing tobacco or dipping snuff was more convenient for Americans trekking westward in their wagons.
[27] American snuff is subject to the same warning labels on all smokeless tobacco, indicating a possibility of oral cancer and tooth loss.
A fictional representation of this is in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, where the Igbo villagers are regular snuff-takers long before they ever encountered the first British missionaries.
In some African countries, such as South Africa and Nigeria, snuff is still quite popular with the older generation, though its use is slowly declining, with cigarette smoking becoming the dominant form of tobacco use[citation needed].
This includes parts of southern Ethiopia, where powdered tobaccos can be purchased at many larger markets across the Oromo region.
