10/18 History of Chocolate

The history of chocolate goes back a very long ways. Long before Columbus discovered America, the Olmec people of the Mexican Gulf Coast were using chocolate drinks. The Mayans used it for drinks, soups and travel food, drying the beans, roasting them and grinding them with spices. The Aztecs also used the cacao bean for food. They used it for levying taxes and as a form of capital. When the Spanish first came, they were introduced to the drink, and initially rejected it as disgusting.



It was not until around seventy years after the new world was discovered that chocolate began to take off in Europe. Beginning in Spain, a more sweetened version of the chocolate drink quickly began to gain popularity.  By the end of the 17th century, chocolate houses were established in London, selling chocolate drinks and confections. In the mid 1800s, a Dutch chemist devised a way to make cocoa powder by removing some of the fat and mixing it in with salts. In 1847, Joseph Fry created the first chocolate bar as we would recognize it by taking cocoa powder and adding the cacao butter back into it. Chocolate candies were soon being produces by many companies including Cadbury and Nestle.

Chocolate was imported to America from the British, who heavily taxed the product. Regardless, it was still quite popular and was served in chocolate houses to wealthy patrons. In a bar form, it was used as a field ration for the American and for the British soldiers during the Revolutionary war, due to it's portability and high energy concentration.

Chocolate became a major staple of industry with increased technology to support bigger and better production methods. It was used as a field ration during World War 2, and has become a huge part of our diets

For more information on the history of chocolate, check out the book Chocolate: a Global History by Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenoch, Chocolate History, Culture, and Heritage edited by Louis Evan Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro, The New Taste of Chocolate by Marieel E Presilla, or Chocolate Pathway to the Gods by Meredith Dreiss and Sharon Edgar Greenhill. Or any other number of books, because there's a lot of them.