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