The History of Chocolate
The Chocolate Connoisseur February 27th, 2007
Discovered over two thousand years ago, the Aztec and Maya people made chocolate from the pod seeds of the cacao tree, which they created into frothy, spicy, bitter drinks. In both Aztec and Maya religious and royal events, chocolate played an important role as priests offered cacao seeds to the gods during sacred ceremonies and served chocolate drinks. Spanish explorers discovered this Aztec custom and shipped cacao tree seeds back to Spain. Chocolate was an expensive import, so for the next three hundred or so years it was an elite beverage enjoyed only by the upper classes of Europe. They designed luxuriant silver and porcelain serving cups and pieces for drinking chocolate that represented symbols of the power and wealth of society’s upper crust. In the mid seventeen-hundreds, after hundreds of years of remaining relatively unaltered, new chocolate making innovations changed the very future of chocolate. In the industrial age new machinery was able to mass produce solid chocolate making this wonderful treat affordable to just about all of the general public.
Early in the seventeen-hundreds a Frenchman invented the hydraulic machine, followed by another French inventor who developed the steam-driven chocolate machine. This steam-driven mill allowed mass-production of huge amounts of chocolate quickly and inexpensively. With these new machines chocolate was no longer an oily, gritty paste but became a creamier, smoother chocolate. In 1828, the cocoa press, invented by a Dutch chemist named Coenraad Van Houten, was able to make powder or cocoa by squeezing out all the cocoa butter, thus making the cocoa uniform and far less expensive to produce. To powdered chocolate, Van Houten also added alkaline salts, making it mix with water better and giving it a milder flavor and darker color. In 1875, Henri Nestlé and Daniel Peter joined forces and combined chocolate and condensed milk, creating a creamy, smooth milk chocolate. It did not take long for this to become increasingly popular.
As culinary experimentation continued, instead of just using chocolate in hot drinks and candy bars, people started using cocoa powder in desserts, cakes and other foods. In North America, around the American Revolution, the Bakers Chocolate Company began manufacturing chocolate on a huge scale, while the Dutch produced a fine-grained powder, which they called the ‘Dutching’ method and which is still popular today with chocolate connoisseurs. They soon began making chocolate into such things as various types of candies, moldable treats, baked goods and chocolate truffles. The first recipe for brownies, published toward the end of the nineteenth century in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, is still a beloved American baked good. Chocolate has continued to increase in popularity over the years, with the average Swiss adult eating approximately twenty pounds and the Americans eating approximately twelve pounds of chocolate annually.
