Читать книгу A Brief History of Chocolate - Steve Berry, Phil Norman - Страница 3
ОглавлениеModern chocolate has a truly global heritage. The ancient Mayans were the first to tap into its unique charms. They harvested cocoa beans as currency, bartered them with the Aztecs for jewellery and - who knows? - probably ripped off their own grannies down the Yucatan branch of Cash4Cocoa. More importantly, they also roasted it for a spicy, astringent drink called xocolatl, but the secret was soon stolen. The victorious Spanish conquistadors left Mexico with galleons-full, which made them very popular back home. Europe’s well-to-do queued up for their morning draft of ‘good hot jocolatte’, adding milk, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar - anything to embellish the rich, unctuous taste. It wasn’t until the development of the cocoa press (by Dutchman Casparus Van Houten - no relation to Denise), which separated the fatty cocoa butter from the dark chocolate powder, that anyone thought to start moulding it into solids.
Confectionery, not necessity, was the mother of invention. Technological breakthroughs followed accordingly: Menier’s chocolate factory (1829); Nestlé’s milk powder formula (1867); Sechaud’s chocolate-filling machine (1913). Each brought affordable, tangible chocolate morsels closer to the (cocoa) masses. Never mind 1066 and all that: as industry laureate elect Roald Dahl zealously declared, ‘These dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the memory of every child.’ Knowing old Roald, he probably meant that literally. Still, it’s no less gruesome a fate than drowning in a river of chocolate, Augustus Gloop-style.
Factories and familiar names sprang up across Britain – Fry, Cadbury, Rowntree – in the most part run by teetotal, pacifist men of faith who believed in the beneficial properties of their product. Little by little, chocolate revealed its versatility: as a gift for a loved one; a reward for an obedient child; or an amuse-bouche at the ambassador’s receptions. Our appetite for the brown stuff continued to develop down the years, particularly around Christmas time. Even after roast turkey with all the trimmings, there always seemed to be room for a little segment of Terry’s tap-it-and-unwrap-it Chocolate Orange.
The passing of time has brought with it more heinous crimes and unearthed the sinful side of the cocoa bean. In recent years, chocolate has been used and abused, whether as a shower-clogging syrup substitute for blood in Hitchcock’s Psycho, or a saucy, valance-staining body paint for bawdy bedroom shenanigans. And what is the point of those edible toolkits? They’re about as much use as a chocolate chastity belt. (Although the spanner might be quite handy for wrenching one open.)
Elvis Presley loved it. Saddam Hussein lived on it. From fountains and fondues to Scottish deep-fat fryers, chocolate gets everywhere. Especially over kids’ faces. Before you know it, we’ll be using it as currency. Chocolate coins, eh? Whatever next?
Badge manners? Rolo (1937), Aztec (1967) and Curly Wurly (1970) lapel decoration opportunities for chocoholic kids.
ONE CHUNK LEADS TO ANOTHER
The first solid block of edible chocolate appeared in this country in 1847, courtesy the Fry brothers of Bristol. Although ‘edible’ in this case is a loose definition: even by the standards of today’s pure cocoa brands, this one was a bitter tooth-breaker. It was only after Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter unveiled the Gala Peter in 1886, the first soft milk chocolate bar, that bars of chocolate looked like they might be a good sister product for the already popular drinking variety.
There were scores of technical problems to overcome first, mainly to do with milk’s tendency to go off at the drop of a hat. By 1902 Fry’s had perfected their weirdly named Five Boys, and Rowntree punted out an Alpine Milk bar. This name was a bit of a giveaway that, as far as the public was concerned, in chocolate terms it was Swiss or nothing, a state of affairs underlined two years later when Nestlé imported the esteemed Kohler and Cailler recipe to their UK factory.
In the end, slow and steady George Cadbury won the race. Eight years in development, his Highland Milk bar tasted good enough to beat the Swiss. It was renamed Dairy Maid, and shortly after renamed again to Dairy Milk, on the advice of a Plymouth shopkeeper. Boasting ‘1½ glasses in every ½lb’, it was launched in 1905 to great success. A year later, the plain Bournville appeared, followed by Fruit and Nut in 1928, Whole Nut two years after that, and a slew of tasty fillings from Caramello to the raisin and biscuit Tiffin from 1934 onwards. It wasn’t Cadbury’s game entirely – Nestlé added Rice Krispies to make their Dairy Crunch in 1938 – but a reputation was being forged. Even Hitler couldn’t stop its advance: one press ad in the bleak days of 1939 advised: ‘The habit of taking a block of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk per day has been medically recommended as a sensible personal precaution for this autumn and winter.’ If, of course, you could get hold of any.
Class and a half. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (1905), Sultana (1982), Whole Nut (1933) and Fruit & Nut (1928) offer scoffable sharing for all.
After the war, diversification was the thing. Dairy Milk blocks added filling upon filling. By 1960, the usual suspects lined up alongside pineapple, peppermint, coffee, marzipan, strawberry and the intriguingly vague ‘mild dessert’. A modern marketing man would express concern about ‘dilution of the core product’, and rightly, as this was the year of an unwelcome intruder. Already the leader in filled bars by a mile, Mars moved into chocolate blocks that autumn with Galaxy: quality chocolate in bigger sizes than Cadbury’s, plugged with a massive ad campaign. Designed as a pre-emptive attack based on rumours Cadbury were working on a Mars bar rival, it did more damage to Cadbury than their Aztec would do to Mars’s crown.
Cadbury fought back by dropping their prices and defending the brand with some rearguard campaigning. The late 1960s was full of entreaties for Britons to ‘award yourself the CDM’. A nice idea, but a bit staid for such a forward-looking time, and in the early ‘70s it became more wistful still, asking punters if, in this modern, synthetic, concrete world, wasn’t it good to know that ‘there’s always Cadbury’s Dairy Milk’? Then in 1976 Rowntree launched their Yorkie, and such statements suddenly looked very optimistic. Hit even harder, Cadbury returned to the ‘glass and a half’ tagline they’d abandoned in the mid-’60s, and fought the lorry drivers of York with Cilla Black putting a chunk in her cheek on the top deck of a Blackpool tram. Meanwhile Frank Muir twisted his tongue round tales of bucolic Fruit and Nut mania to the strains of Tchaikovsky, and a scarily omnipotent calypso band informed unwitting citizens of the world that, regarding nuts (whole hazelnuts), Cadbury take them and they cover them in chocolate. To seal this fightback, the bars themselves also became thicker (and pricier) once more.
Chock-A-Block. Astronomer’s favourite, Mars Galaxy (1960) and the less-than-stellar Cadbury’s Big One (1971).
The ever-changing sizes were in part due to the rocketing price of cocoa, which increased tenfold between 1973 and 1977. It made sense to shift the focus away from the actual chocolate, of which there was inevitably going to be a lot less, and onto the exotic innards. And innards didn’t come more exotic than 1970s innards, with Cadbury leading the way. Things started off simply with the self-explanatory Oranges and Lemons (‘a happy new taste in filled blocks!’). Chips of various types were added: Crunchie pieces in Golden Crisp, mint shards in the well-loved Ice Breaker. A spate of Wild West branding came along (as it did to most snack foods at the time, for some reason). The gingham-clad raisin and biscuit slab Country Style was promoted with a sharpshooting variation on Spot the Ball, and Gold Mine – a Golden Crisp but with slightly smaller Crunchie chunks – carried on the frontier theme. They got more geographically adventurous with the Cadbury Classic range, featuring the tangy Ginger bar, the orange- and curaçao-steeped Grand Seville, and the papaya-stuffed Tropical Fruit. The other houses followed suit. In all, over forty-four new chocolate bars were introduced during the decade. Thirty were swiftly withdrawn, but that’s still not a bad hit rate.
Short and sweet. Cadbury’s Ice Breaker, circa 1973, and Gold Mine (1975) shared a brittle heart and an all-too brief shelf life.
Terry’s upmarket range was called Royal Gold. Coffee, lime, Turkish delight and marzipan temptingly resided within the shiniest of wrappers. They even broke up a bar, wrapping each tablet individually, packaging the lot back together again in slab form and calling it, for reasons obscure, the Oliver Twist. Nestlé, meanwhile, artfully dodged controversy by producing the reliably posh Superfine and Coffee Cream, with an occasional luxury item flourish, such as the muesli-adorned Alpine bar. Rowntree, by comparison, kept oddly quiet – Yorkie aside – during this product deluge. They scored an early winner with Mint Cracknel, a bar whose intriguing spun sugar centre was made in roughly the same way as nylon thread – as indeed was the facial hair of its on-screen representative, Noel Edmonds.
Terry’s, employing neon-handwriting style logos to full effect in the futuristic ‘80s with Bitz (1983) and Dark circa 1982.
If diversity was the watchword in the 1970s, the following decade was all about consolidation. Cadbury rebuilt their own image behind Dairy Milk (which, from 1985, went king size, along with everything else). They reintroduced dormant varieties like roast almond and sultana, and added the odd new bar like ‘when milk and plain collide’ peculiarity Gambit, but the main draw was increasingly Cadbury themselves, embracing the ‘80s corporate brand mania like an old hand. Terry’s, meanwhile, embraced the decade’s other nascent trend, graphic design, to jazz up the wrappers of their crispy chip Bitz range. As with nearly all design of this vintage, what started off looking like something from a millionaire’s pleasure palace in the Caribbean soon acquired the air of a Dunstable nightclub’s ladies night flyer. More sure-footed was Logger, a standard segmented bar cunningly disguised as a tree, and advertised with a shameless Monty Python lumberjack sketch homage. Such visual depreciation was common by now, and everyone soon learned that strong, traditional lines suited them best. Combine this with a fashion for corporate takeovers within the industry, and the seemingly endless variety of the 1970s chocolate market seemed to thin out drastically after 1990. Rowntree were subsumed by Nestlé, Terry’s by Kraft. Cadbury circled their wagons ever tighter, badging everything under the Dairy Milk label, while Mars continued to parry them with Galaxy. The shelves that had once heaved with wrappers of all hues and designs now bore endless ranks of relentlessly focus-grouped purple and brown. No more would entire lines be rebranded on the whim of a shop girl from Plymouth. This made sound business sense, but some of the fun had been let out, children of the future denied the Dickensian pleasure of bursting into a sweet shop and asking for ‘an Oliver Twist, two Tiffins and a Big Wig, please!’.
Come up to the lab and see what’s in the slab. Cadbury’s Gambit (1967), Nestle’s Feast circa 1974, Dairy Crunch (1965), Hazel Nut circa 1975, and Fizz Bang (1980); Cadbury-Fry’s Tiffin (1967).
BRANDED FOR LIFE
Wonderful as chocolate is, there’s a limit to what you can do with a bar of it. Bung in a fruity filling here, sling some hazelnuts at it from over there, wrap it round a bit of frothy nougat... there are other options, but most of those risk a custodial sentence. As the big chocolate companies of the land expanded and consolidated, they found these tired old tricks, most of them dating from before the war, weren’t giving them the brand range their national status required. So, if you can’t jigger up the contents, why not play about with the shape? This had been going on since the start of the century, with the likes of Fry’s Five Boys, a weird little bar decorated with the gurning expressions of one Lindsay Poulton, supposedly to demonstrate the tortuous emotional states gone through by the average small boy awaiting his cocoa fix.
Everyone knows his name – Rupert, Rupert the bar (1971).
Such high-concept wrapper action had no place in the modern chocolate era, though. Three simple pack-festooning candidates ruled the shelves: wacky cartoon animals, famous folk from the cinema and telly, and famous wacky cartoon animals from the cinema and telly. In 1970 Nestlé launched the Winnie the Pooh chocolate bar: bog-standard milk chocolate, but with a variety of characters from Disney’s recent A.A. Milne revamp on the labels. The sheer cross-media crowd-pleasing of this sort of thing was too good to do just the once, so over the next couple of years they pulled the same trick with The Aristocats, Robin Hood and the ever-collectable Doctor Who. When the chocolate ran out, the endorsements didn’t. The Pink Panther bar, a slab of strawberry-flavoured... stuff decorated with everyone’s favourite slightly camp gentleman, scholar and acrobat, was the first and most memorable of these (even if some of those memories come with a slightly suspicious aftertaste). Others included a cream-flavour Star Trek bar (‘She cannae taste any blander, Cap’n!’) and various Tom and Jerry concoctions, including a banana variant.
Chasing the pink pound – Nestle’s Pink Panther (1972).
BBC children’s programmes, as a rule, weren’t up for this sort of treatment, though since many were produced by third parties who kept merchandising rights close to their chests, there wasn’t a lot the Beeb could do if, say, FilmFair decided to let Chocolat Tobler launch a range of bars named after (but, crucially, not flavoured with) The Herbs. And if they then went off to Nestlé and got them to make Paddington Bear and Wombles chocolate, well, there wasn’t much Chocolat Tobler could do about that, either. Canny do-it-yourself cartoon maker Bob Godfrey similarly played the percentages, licensing Roobarb chocolate to Cadbury and the later Noah and Nelly bar franchise to Nestlé. It was every furry stop-motion animal for himself. Oliver Postgate, needless to say, kept well away from this sort of thing.
TV hits! Doctor Who (1971/3), Mr Men circa 1977, and The Wombles circa 1976, sell out in the name of cocoa.
Of course, not all hot intellectual property owners are up for handing out merchandising rights to the first sweet maker who gets them on the blower. Whether Barker and Dobson, otherwise highly esteemed manufacturers of Everton mints and the like, ever got in touch with ABC Television in 1978 to enquire about the spin-off state of affairs of the top-rating Happy Days is unknown, but their Fonz Rock Bar was a masterclass in endorsement-free cashing in, with its ‘50s jukebox stylings and cunning lack of any identifiable Henry Winkler presence on the wrapper at all. If you wanted official endorsement, perhaps it was best to aim low, as Austro-Welsh confectioners Caxton’s did in 1972 when they rolled out their Doris Archer Fudge, with full consent from the fictional Radio 4 soap matriarch.
Feeding time at the zoo, with Nestle’s milk chocolate menagerie, Animal Bar (1963), and Fry’s Super Mousse (1970).
If all else failed, you could make up your own characters from scratch. The uber-cute critters that simpered from Nestlé’s mighty, ever-expanding zoological Animal Bar range were a palpable hit with no telly counterpart needed, and their white chocolate Polar Joe bear bar didn’t do too badly either. The same couldn’t perhaps be said quite so emphatically of Fry’s Super Mousse, where the marketing department took one look at the mousse-filled chocolate slab in their charge and thought, ‘Mousse? Moose!’ So was born the Bullwinkle-esque superhero star of the wrappers, hailed by Fry’s as a ‘mythological personality’ who was sure to capture the hearts and minds of the nation’s children overnight. He didn’t. Neither did the cartoon band on the wrappers of Needler’s Pop Chocs range: Slicer Orange, Miss Krispie and Big Drummer Cocoa bore no resemblance to any genuine band, even in 1974, and their pop chocs remained unpicked. And who can forget Trebor’s Konks and Robbers, a Keystone Kops-oriented attempt to flog orange chocolate with the likes of Inspector Clueless, Konstable Klod and Ratnose Fink? A great many people, clearly.
Film fare. More cartoonish cash-ins from Galaxy and the adventures of Noddy (1970), Nestle’s Larry the Lamb (1970), Cadbury’s Soccerbar (1973), Monster Bar (1973) and Roobarb (1974).
As a last resort, you could brighten up a young child’s day with some entertaining spiel on the back of the wrapper. Okay, ‘entertaining’ often meant a rather dreary retelling of a TV episode, as with Nestlé’s Larry the Lamb bars (‘Part 3: Larry is fishing when he sees the Mayor approaching on a small raft’). Cadbury’s Soccerbars featured tips on how to improve match fitness. ‘Stop eating this chocolate’ might have been a good one, but the writers gamely tried to link sportsmanship with Bournville brands (‘Did you know that star footballers play leapfrog, Freddo’s favourite sport?’). They really let their hair down for the descriptions of assorted unlikely critters on Monster Bars. (‘The Murky Murgswump is a nasty monster that lurks about in murky swamps. The damp gives him nasty pains so that when he bends down he goes “OOH-AAH-OUCH!”’) Perhaps The Wombles bar gambit was best: a short description of how the MacWomble can crush nuts with his bare paws, and a cheery exhortation to Keep Britain Tidy by chucking the wrapper in the nearest bin. Wait a minute, though: weren’t you supposed to be collecting them? Once again, Tobermory hadn’t quite thought it through.
35% cocoa solids, 65% Beatrix Potter. Cadbury’s Furry Friends promise further animal adventures, circa 1974.
BEHIND BARS
Jargon alert! Ask any chocolatier or confectionery insider (and who doesn’t know at least three?) and they will tell you: a substantial majority of their industry profits is generated by what are known as ‘countlines’, those smooth choc-covered treats, filled with nougat, caramel, ill-fated factory-floor rats and so on, designed to be eaten on the move.
The cash cow of Slough: Mars (1932)
This particular form of one-handed pleasure isn’t easy to sell. Before the days of commercial television, kids were too busy up chimneys and picking pockets to buy their own sweets. The advent of advertising allowed brand leaders and their highly paid agencies to come up with increasingly ingenious campaigns to remind us that countlines were reliable, dependable and enjoyable (as opposed to the commonplace, lacklustre and dreary reality).
So, when Mars brought their popular candy bar over from the US to London in 1932, deliberately changing the recipe to suit European tastes (more sugar, less malt, sweeter caramel and, at first – unbelievably – Cadbury’s chocolate), they were unwittingly helping a future slogan-writer (not Murray Walker, despite what you might read elsewhere) come over all expert practitioner: ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.’ While the tagline riffed nattily on the old apple/doctor-repellent adage (ousting the previous Bob Monkhouse-fronted ‘Stars love Mars’ campaign in 1959), TV screens could be filled with sumptuous close-ups of sugar, caramel and thick, thick chocolate slathering over a nougat slab, yet still reinforce the impression that the Mars bar was not only nutritious, but practically vital. Of course, any claims were medically difficult to prove. (The reasoning went: milk ‘to nourish you, while you relax’; sugar ‘to give you the energy to work’; and chocolate, more exuberantly, ‘to play’. Oh, and glucose – just sugar again, wearing a pharmacist’s lab coat – which could do the work of the other three standing on its head.)
