Ah, chocolate! We like chocolate. Sweet, sweet, wonderful chocolate. Sweet, brown, sweet dark, sweet milk, sweet light, sweet, sweet, sinfully so. Food of heaven and love and…the bane of dentists the world over.

Chocolate has a magical place in modern society. It’s supposed to be good for you, it’s supposed to cheer you up, it’s said that we should always have a bit of chocolate in our diets to keep them balanced. That’s good news, isn’t it? Right after reading that, I bet you all ran off from your studies and bedrooms, computer-chairs spinning, off to get a nice, big bar of Cadbury’s or Whitman’s or Lindt or something like that, right? And well you might have. But what you’re probably grabbing onto, with your sugary-felching paws, right now and crooning over like a shriveled up bald guy with a gold ring…

…is only the end result of chocolate. The result of years, decades and centuries of chocolatey evolution. The actual chocolate bar as we know it today, block-chocolate, eating-chocolate, is only about two hundred years old, which is nothing in the scope of history. Interesting, isn’t it?

Where does Chocolate Come From?

The basic ingredient for all chocolate is cocoa-powder. Cocoa-powder comes from the…cocoa bean. And the cocoa bean comes from a big, round thing called a cacao pod. No, that’s not a spelling-mistake, the ‘a’ and ‘o’ change places. In its absolutely most raw state, ‘chocolate’ looks like this:

Cocoa-beans inside a cocao-pod

The cocao pod and the corresponding cocao plant from which it comes from, originally grew in South America. It was the Aztecs who first discovered chocolate, and invented the first use for it…as a rather spicy drink! Now when we think of chocolate, we don’t exactly think of it as spicy, but I guess South Americans are famous for spicy food…even thousands of years ago! Once the cocao-pods had been harvested and cracked open, the beans inside were scooped out and dried. Once dried, during which they transformed from that rather weird whitish appearance to a more familiar brown tint, the beans were smashed and crushed and chopped up. The resulting cocoa-flakes or powder was mixed in with crushed, chopped-up dried chili. The mixture was ground up even further, and then water was added to the mixture and the entire substance was stirred around to produce really…really…hot chocolate.

And for hundreds of years…this was chocolate. A spicy, sweet, bitter drink.

The First Chocolate

Chocolate was discovered by the Europeans in the 16th century, when Spanish explorers brought it back from South America. Experimentation with cocoa led to Europeans removing chili from the mix and adding in substances such as cream, sugar, butter and milk, in an attempt to sweeten the mixture and make it more palatable to European tastebuds. Chocolate became popular in royal courts around Europe and “chocolate houses”, much like coffehouses or teahouses, popped up where the people who could afford it, went to experience this new, sweet and delicious sensation. The first ‘chocolate house’ opened in London in 1657.

And what a sensation it was. Although by this time, from the 1500s until the end of the 18th century, chocolate was still “hot chocolate” or drinking-chocolate as we know it today, it became wildly popular throughout Europe. People started making vessels and utensils specifically for use with chocolate. We have teapots and coffeepots today, and teacups and coffee-cups and saucers today…but when is the last time you saw one of these on sale at the local shopping-centre’s kitchen-area?

This isn’t a communal coffee-tankard like you’d find in the office…it’s a chocolate pot. It was filled up with hot chocolate and dispensed to the drinkers through the spigot at the bottom. This particular one dates from the golden age of drinking chocolate, around the mid 1700s. It’s Dutch, it’s made of pewter and it’s a foot and a half high by a foot wide at its widest point. That’s a lot of chocolate.

But a chocolate-pot could, in theory, be used with any liquid. But there were utensils created which were created for chocolate, to be used with chocolate, and only for chocolate, and which could probably be used for absolutely nothing else. Like this curiosity:

This is called a molinillo. Although it looks extremely pretty and well-made and rather decorative…this was actually a kitchen utensil! Molinillos were invented by the Mexicans in the 1700s and spread around the world from there. What is it used for? Making hot chocolate, of course! Or rather, in the days before those fancy, stainless steel chocolate-making machines that we have today which create foam and froth with alarming hissing and gurgling sounds, a molinillo was used to create the rich, frothy texture to be found in any expertly made drinking-chocolate. This frothiness was achieved by dunking the larger end of the utensil into the drink and then rubbing the molinillo rapidly between your palms. This caused the molinillo to spin rapidly inside the chocolate, frothing it up and making it light and delicious. Traditionally, the molinillo would sit inside the hot chocolate pot, and the long, wooden handle would stick out of the top of the pot, through a specially-drilled hole in the lid. That way, anyone desirous of some nice hot chocolate could hand-froth their own drink before pouring it out into a cup.

Mmmmm…Chocolate…

By now, you probably know where chocolate came from, how it was consumed and the craze that it caused throughout the Western world at the time, but what you may not know is how ‘Chocolate’ got the name…’Chocolate’. Why chocolate? What did it mean? Where did it come from? How is it spelt!?

‘Chocolate’, meaning a sweet confectionary made from the beans of the cacao-pod, was originally spelt ‘xocolatl’. This word comes from the Nahuatl language, which was spoken by the Aztecs, who were for centuries the grand-high-hokey-pokey guardians of this amazing delicacy and who sacrificed bunnies on piles of sugar to appease the Cocoa-Gods…eh…no. The Aztec word ‘Xocolatl’ came from the two words, ‘Xococ’ and ‘Atl’. Literally, they meant “bitter water”, which reflected chocolate’s original status as a bittersweet, spicy beverage drunk by the Aztecs, who added ground-up chili to the mixture. The spelling and pronunciation were changed over the centuries, replacing ‘Xocolatl’ with a more conventional word…’Chocolate’.

The Arrival of Modern Chocolate

Modern chocolate…eating-chocolate, the kind that we know today, and which we can go into the supermarket and buy off the shelves, was rather late in coming in the history of chocolate. Block chocolate, the most common variety of chocolate that we consume today, was only invented in the 1840s! The man responsible for this groundbreaking revolution in chocolate production was a man named Joseph Storrs Fry. Fry was a chocolatier (chocolate-maker) by profession. His family had run a chocolate-making firm since the 1760s! It was founded by his father, also named Joseph Fry. When Old Joe died, his son, Joseph S. Fry, took over, with his mother’s help. A couple of business-partners who dropped in and dropped out later, and Joseph S. Fry returned the company to its family-based roots, with his three sons entering the chocolate-making business with their father. It was in 1847, when the company was known as “J.S. Fry & Sons” that the Fry Family hit on the production of modern chocolate!

The Frys revelation came when they melted cocoa-butter and added it to ‘dutched chocolate’ (or ‘cocoa-powder’ as it’s known today) and sugar. The result of this blending and careful measurement was that when the mixture cooled, they were left with a thick pasty chocolate which they discovered could be poured into moulds or blocks and then made to set hard…creating the world’s first chocolate-bars! The process was perfected over the coming years and by the 1860s, J.S. Fry & Sons were selling the world’s first commercially-successful eating-chocolate in the world!

This revelation of how to make chocolate that you could…EAT…instead of just drinking hot from a chocolate-cup, swept through Europe like the Plague did centuries earlier. In 1849, two Englishmen set up another chocolate-making firm. In the 1860s, a Swiss chandler and a German manufacturer of baby-foods joined forces and, combining their shared knowledge of experience in one’s father-in-law’s chocolate factory and the other’s background in specialty foods, they founded another company in 1866. Another Swiss invented a process to make chocolate more evenly blended, which led to smoother and more velvety chocolate. It was the machinery that allowed this process to happen that inspired an American confectioner who made hard candies, to turn his hands to making hard chocolate as well.

Who were these people?

John and Benjamin Cadbury
Daniel Peter and his partner Henri Nestle
Rodolphe Lindt
Milton Hershey

It was these giants of innovation and creativity and experimentation that launched the chocolate revolution that resulted in the modern, edible chocolate-bar that we know today. To this day, Cadbury’s, Nestle’s, Lindt’s and Hershey’s chocolates remain the most famous in the world. And if you’ve ever wondered what the Cadbury brothers’ slogan ‘A Glass and a Half’ means, it referred to adding a glass and a half of full cream milk to every half-pound of chocolate, to give it that distinctive milky taste.