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“If one swallows a cup of chocolate only three hours after a copious lunch, everything will be perfectly digested and there will still be room for dinner.”

Brillat Savarin

Colourfully wrapped chocolate bars line store candy displays. Ice-cold chocolate milk is stocked in supermarket refrigerators, while higher end chocolatiers such as Laura Secord and Godiva sell eight out of every ten fancy boxes of chocolates in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Mother’s Day.

Chocolate is the world’s favourite flavour. It is also one of the world’s most global food products. Cultivated in the New World and transported to the Old, the chocolate we enjoy today has been influenced by over five centuries of innovation and refinement in many countries, including Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and England—and, to a lesser extent, the United States and even Canada.

Yet the origins of chocolate are planted exclusively in the temperamental roots of the Theobroma cacao. The tree was named in 1753 by Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, who found the Old World’s initial name for the plant, cacao, or chocolate tree, too vulgar. Von Linné preferred instead to respect the tree’s New World roots by combining the Greek theos, or god, with broma, or beverage.¹

Over the years, the Old World appears to have won out as the name Theobroma cacao has been simplified to the more manageable “cacao tree.” But the name is the only thing that is simple about this complex tree. To produce its harvest, the cacao tree must be grown in moist and humid climates, no further than twenty degrees longitude on either side of the equator.

The first known use of the cacao bean occurred in the fourth century, immediately south of present-day Mexico, amid the inspiring stone temple cities of what is often referred to as the Mayan empire. The empire can be more accurately described as a group of Mayan states, sharing a similar culture and little else, that stretched from the Yucatán peninsula to the Pacific coast of Guatemala.

The Mayan culture is widely considered to be the greatest civilization of the original cultures. Known as “people of the book,” the Mayans could write of their art and culture, including the use of the valuable cacao bean.

“The bean was so highly valued, that it was used as a form of currency at a fixed market rate,” wrote the New Internationalist in an in-depth feature on the cocoa chain. “You could get a rabbit for ten beans, a slave cost a hundred and a prostitute went from eight to ten according to how they agree.”

The valuable cacao bean was also used by Mayan priests to create a thick spicy chocolate drink known as chocolatl. Cacao was considered to be a symbol of both fertility and prosperity. The “drink of the gods” produced from the bean was used to solemnize sacred rituals and was consumed by Mayan elite, who often contained their chocolate in magnificent pottery cylinders.

As with chocolate today, the Mayans did not have just one drink recipe. Ingredients such as porridge, gruel, and spices (including chili) were carefully added to create different tastes and textures.

The Mayans were also aggressive traders. As a result, chocolate had already spread north to the Aztec Empire of central Mexico by the time the Mayan civilization began to crumble in the ninth century. The frugal Aztecs used the cacao bean as currency, using beans to prepare chocolatl only when the commodity had become so worn that it could no longer be traded.

Once again, the consumption of chocolate was considered a luxury restricted to Aztec kings, noblemen, and the upper ranks of the priesthood, although chocolate was also given to warriors because of its energy-boosting properties.

According to American historian William Hickling, Emperor Montezuma of Mexico refused any beverage other than chocolatl, which he consumed in goblets before entering his harem, likely contributing to the belief that the drink was also an aphrodisiac. The Emperor is reported to have consumed up to 50 cups of chocolatl a day.

Christopher Columbus tasted the drink in 1502 but was largely unimpressed. Spanish explorer and conqueror Hernán Cortés was quick to recognize the value the Aztecs placed on cacao beans in 1519. He established cacao plantations around the Caribbean and returned to Spain in 1528 with a cargo of beans, an Aztec recipe, and the instruments for preparing the native drink.

Chocolatl predates the arrival of coffee and tea in Europe by more than eighty years. And it was in Spain that the drink would undergo its first major innovation. Early acceptance of the New World drink within the Spanish political and cultural elite was decidedly mixed. One individual described the bitter-tasting liquid as better fit for pigs than for people.

Nevertheless, enthusiasm for the beverage could not be contained, especially after the Spanish emperor sweetened the drink with cane sugar, vanilla, and even wine. For the next century, Spanish clergy would continue to refine the drink with nuts, powdered flowers, orange water, and recently discovered spices and sugar from the Orient.

Chocolate became a welcome addition to an otherwise bland diet of meat, bread, porridge, and a limited supply of vegetables. The Spanish were anxious to keep the exotic beverage a secret from the rest of Europe.

In 1580, the first chocolate-processing plant was established in Spain. By this time, chocolate was a status symbol to be enjoyed in excess by a privileged few. Initially, the drink was consumed in the original manner of the Mayans and the Aztecs. As the appetite for chocolate grew, the method of transferring the liquid from vessel to lip was refined. It was served thick, cold, and frothy in cups, and would later be poured hot from steaming gold vermeil carafes or chocolate pots.

Fashionable Chocolateríes became features in Spanish cities and towns. The wealthy would gather in the afternoon for a cup of chocolate and a piece of picatoste, or fried bread, to dip in it. Less fashionable was the rumour that Charles the Second of Spain sat sipping chocolate while observing victims of the inquisition being put to death.

The Spanish considered the properties of chocolate to be less spiritual and more medicinal. It was common for medical entrepreneurs to study the exotic substances brought back by explorers as a cure for various ailments. Chocolate was no exception, and it was said to be useful for covering up poisons.

By the late 1600s, the grand ladies of the land had become so fond of this frothy beverage that they were accustomed to having it served to them frequently, even in church. As justification for their enjoyment, they referred to its medicinal use, and claimed it prevented fainting and “weakness” during the long ceremonies.

One bishop considered it a blatant abuse, and he forbade the practice. Drinking chocolate in church obviously broke the fast laws. (Not to mention that so much pleasure must be pagan!) The ladies, in retaliation, simply took themselves and their entourage to another church. A rumour holds that the offending clergyman later died of a cup of poisoned chocolate. The whole affair became a fearful scandal.

Eventually, in 1662, Pope Alexander VII put a final solution to the affair when he declared “Liquidum non frangit jejunum.” [Liquids (including chocolate) do not break the fast.] It is likely that this decision was based on the fact that chocolate, like so many other herbs, was considered to have medicinal qualities.

The pleasure of chocolate could not be contained. Word of this extraordinary beverage spread throughout Europe. Antonio Carletti, a Florentine merchant, wrote about the growing and processing of cacao into a drink during a visit to Guatemala.

The Spanish custom of chocolate drinking was introduced to the French court in 1615, during the marriage of Anne of Austria with Louis XIII of France. A gift of chocolate was part of the Spanish Infanta’s dowry.

The French also seized on the medicinal properties of chocolate. Francois Joseph Broussais, a French physician born in 1772, said, “Chocolate of good quality, well made, properly cooked, is one of the best cures that I have yet found for my patients and for myself.”

By the 1650s, approximately 130 years after chocolatl had been introduced to Spain, chocolate had made its way across the English Channel to London. It might have arrived much sooner, but Elizabethan privateers, patrolling the seas of the late sixteenth century for Spanish ships to plunder, appeared even less impressed by the cacao bean than Columbus.

In 1579, the English buccaneers are said to have mistaken a shipload of cacao beans for sheep droppings and to have burned the vessel and its precious cargo. On another occasion, the English destroyed more than 100,000 loads of cacao, or 240 million beans, in the Mexican port of Guatulco.²

England’s first chocolate house was opened in London in 1657 by a Frenchman. The June 6, 1657 issue of the Public Advertiser announced, “In Bishopsgate Street, in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West India drink, called Chocolat, to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time; and also unmade, at reasonable prices.”

The paper proclaimed chocolate’s medicinal qualities, writing that the drink “cures and preserves the body of many diseases.”

Reasonable prices, however, were open to interpretation. For despite its widespread acceptance into European society, chocolate’s democratization remained many years away. In England, unlike France and other European countries, chocolate was available to whoever could afford the price. But in 1660 the British Parliament raised money for King Charles II by imposing a seventy-five pence per pound tax on the import of raw cacao beans, thus keeping the processed product out of the reach of the ordinary Briton. If someone was caught smuggling cacao beans, the penalty was one year in prison.

British duties on cacao and gallons of drinking chocolate also served to moderate consumption, which suited the King, who considered chocolate houses hotbeds of sedition. Excessive taxation, however, did not spoil Britain’s appetite for chocolate. In 1874, an avant-garde London coffeehouse called At the Coffee Mill and Tobacco Roll began serving chocolate in cakes and rolls in the Spanish tradition.

Despite its popularity, the chocolate drink that consumed Europe in the eighteenth century bears precious little resemblance to the drinking chocolate we enjoy today. The problem was with the cacao bean itself.

To produce a drink, the bean has to be ground into what is commonly known as chocolate liquor. The crude processes to create early European drinking chocolate involved roasting the cacao bean and grinding it into chocolate liquor. The liquor contained 53 percent fat or cacao butter. Once turned into a beverage, the butter would naturally rise to the top in greasy blobs, making the drink unappetizing and sometimes difficult to digest.

The Aztecs crudely tried to solve the problem by adding ground maize to absorb the fat. Europeans either boiled the liquid, skimming the butter from the top, or also used starch-based substances such as rice and barely. The solution, however, was to separate the cacao butter from the solid.

Remarkably, the Spanish were largely silent during this stage of chocolate’s evolving history. In the late eighteenth century, chocolate factories were springing up across Europe. Many struggled unsuccessfully to develop a process that would separate, or at least reduce, the amount of cacao butter contained in the chocolate liquor. In 1815, Coenraad Johannes van Houten, a Dutch chemist, began work in his Amsterdam factory on a process that would revolutionize the manufacture of drinking chocolate while paving the way for eating chocolate.

By 1828, van Houten had patented the world’s first hydraulic press. The hand-operated device reduced the cacao butter contained in the roasted bean by approximately 25 percent, leaving behind a “cake” that could be pulverized into the powder we now know as cocoa (or cocoa essence, as it was called in van Houten’s time).

Van Houten went on to treat the cocoa with alkaline salts (potassium or sodium carbonates) to improve its blending with hot water. This process is known as “Dutching,” and it also darkens the colour of the chocolate while producing a milder flavour.

For the first time, cheap chocolate powder could be produced for the masses. Ten years after he had patented the process, van Houten sold the rights to his cocoa press. One of his first customers was J.S. Fry & Sons of Bristol, England.

The full legacy of van Houten’s contribution to chocolate making lies not completely in what his press created—cocoa—but what it left behind: a source of pure cacao butter. The melting point of cacao butter is approximately 35°C, which means that it remains solid at room temperature. By returning a portion of the butter to the paste, it would create a soft, smooth form of chocolate that one could eat rather than drink.

J.S. Fry & Sons are largely acknowledged as the first to successfully produce a variety of eating chocolate. By 1847, the firm had perfected a process that mixed cocoa powder with sugar and melted cacao butter to produce a chocolate paste that could be poured into moulds.

The chocolate that came out of those moulds was coarse and gritty, its flavour harsh, but the public did not seem to mind. This was at a time when the English considered most things French to represent the highest standard in both beauty and good taste. Seizing on the mood, Fry’s named its first edible chocolate, “Chocolat Délicieux à Manger.” Fry’s chocolate was first exhibited in 1849 at a trade fair in Birmingham, England, where it became an instant success.

As companies such as rival Cadbury Brothers of Birmingham raced to duplicate Fry’s success with even smoother and tastier products, the cost of the once troublesome cacao butter skyrocketed (today it is one of the world’s most expensive edible natural fats).

Less than a quarter of a century after van Houten’s cocoa press had made drinking chocolate available to the masses, the inflated price of cacao butter once again created a social divide. The cost of manufacturing eating chocolate priced the product out of the reach of most people. Drinking chocolate, once the exclusive indulgence of the privileged, was now considered common.

Still, refinements to chocolate making continued. Swiss chocolatier Philippe Suchard invented the world’s first mélangeur, or mixing machine, in 1826. In 1879, another Swiss chocolatier, Rodolphe Lindt, invented the process of continuously stirring chocolate in its final product stages, creating the first melting chocolate. The process was known as conching.

Conching puts the chocolate through a kneading action and takes its name from the shell-like shape of the containers originally employed. The “conches,” as the machines are called, are equipped with heavy rollers that plow back and forth through the chocolate mass for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Under regulated speeds, these rollers can produce different degrees of agitation and aeration in developing and modifying the chocolate flavours.

In some manufacturing setups, there is an emulsifying operation that either takes the place of conching or else supplements it. A machine works like an eggbeater to break up sugar crystals and other particles in the chocolate mixture to give it a fine, velvety smoothness.

After the emulsifying or conching machines, the mixture goes through a tempering interval—heating, cooling, and reheating—and then at last into moulds to be formed into the shape of the complete product. The moulds take a variety of shapes and sizes, from the popular individual bars available to consumers to the ten-pound blocks used by confectionery manufacturers.

The creation of milk chocolate did not occur until 1867, although the first blending of chocolate liquor with hot milk to create a creamy chocolate drink dates back to 1727. The difficulty in marrying milk with chocolate is easy to understand. Chocolate is 80 percent fat, while milk is 89 percent water. As was the case with cacao butter separating from chocolate drink, fat and water do not mix.

In 1867, Henri Nestlé, a Swiss chemist, discovered a process to make condensed milk through evaporation. David Peter, a Swiss chocolatier, took the process one step further. By adding cocoa powder and sugar to condensed milk and kneading it, Peter created the chocolate crumb essential in the manufacture of today’s chocolate bars.

The dry chocolate crumb was mixed with additional cacao butter, chocolate liquor, and other ingredients, then turned into a paste and ground until smooth. Early Nestlé milk chocolate raised the standard of making chocolate in Europe, but it was time-consuming to make and expensive to buy. It took Nestlé close to a week to produce a single batch. Meanwhile, manufacturers elsewhere in Europe tried to work around Nestlé’s closely guarded secret with formulas of their own.

Secrecy is as much the lifeblood of the confectionery industry as the veins of cocoa butter and syrup that flow into the making of chocolate and candies.

Where methods of manufacturing are concerned, manufacturers have developed individual variations from the pattern. Each manufacturer seeks to protect his methods by conducting certain operations under an atmosphere of secrecy. Modern technology, in this respect, is reminiscent of the day of the Spanish monopoly.

Today’s secrets, unlike those of old, include many small but important details, which centre on key manufacturing operations. Consequently, no chef guards his favourite recipes more zealously than the chocolate manufacturer guards his formulas for blending beans or the time intervals he gives to his conching. Time intervals, temperatures, and proportions of ingredients are three critical factors that no company wants to divulge.

Chocolate viscosity tests are important in the stabilization and control of chocolate coatings.