When Europeans first encountered chocolate, they did not eat it and did not much like it. It was a drink — dark, bitter, frothy, spiced with chilli and other flavourings — and to the Spanish palate it tasted strange and medicinal. The idea of chocolate as a sweet, solid bar that melts on the tongue would have baffled every human being who consumed it for the first three thousand years of its history. That familiar bar is a Victorian invention, the product of nineteenth-century industrial chemistry, and it arrived astonishingly late in a very long story.
Food of the gods, currency of empires
The cacao tree, Theobroma cacao — the Latin name means "food of the gods" — is native to the Americas, and the peoples of Mesoamerica had been cultivating it and drinking its ground, fermented beans for millennia. Among the Maya and later the Aztecs, the resulting beverage was prized, ritualised and reserved largely for the elite, warriors and religious ceremonies. So valuable were the beans that the Aztecs used them as currency: you could buy goods, and even settle debts, in cacao. The Aztec ruler Montezuma is famously said to have consumed the bitter drink in quantity. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the sixteenth century, they were taking possession, without quite realising it, of both a luxury and a form of money.
The Spanish carried cacao back to Europe, where the key adaptation was the addition of sugar, transforming the bitter ceremonial drink into a sweet, fashionable indulgence. For a century and more, chocolate remained a drink — the preserve of European aristocracy and, in due course, of the chocolate houses that sprang up alongside coffee houses in seventeenth-century London. Throughout this period chocolate was something you sipped, not something you chewed.
The Dutch breakthrough
The transformation into a solid began in the Netherlands. In 1828 the Dutch chocolate maker Casparus van Houten patented a hydraulic press that could squeeze much of the fat — the cocoa butter — out of roasted cacao, leaving a dry cake that could be ground into a fine cocoa powder. He also developed a treatment with alkaline salts, still known as "Dutching," that made the powder milder and more soluble. Van Houten's press was the pivotal invention: by separating cocoa solids from cocoa butter, it gave chocolate-makers two ingredients they could recombine in new proportions.
That recombination produced the bar. In 1847 the British firm of J.S. Fry & Sons, in Bristol, mixed cocoa powder, sugar and melted cocoa butter into a paste that could be poured into a mould and set — the first solid eating chocolate bar as we would recognise it. Fry's, along with fellow Quaker-run firms Cadbury and Rowntree, would dominate British chocolate for generations, the Quaker business families having embraced chocolate partly as a wholesome alternative to alcohol.
The Swiss and the milk
Early eating chocolate was dark and often gritty. Two Swiss innovations refined it into the product the world now craves. The first was milk chocolate. Adding milk to chocolate was difficult because milk's water content spoiled the mix, but in the 1870s the former candlemaker turned Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter solved the problem by using condensed milk supplied by his neighbour, a former pharmacist's assistant turned condensed-milk manufacturer named Henri Nestlé. Milk chocolate was, in effect, the marriage of a chocolate-maker and a milk-preservation salesman, and it made chocolate softer, sweeter and far more popular.
The second innovation was texture. In 1879 Rodolphe Lindt invented a process called conching, in which the chocolate is slowly rolled and aerated for hours or days. Conching drove off harsh flavours and coated the sugar and cocoa particles in fat, producing chocolate that was smooth and melting rather than coarse and brittle. Lindt's "fondant" chocolate set a new standard, and the combination of van Houten's press, Fry's bar, Peter and Nestlé's milk, and Lindt's conche gave the world essentially the chocolate it eats today.
It is worth pausing on how recent all this is. For roughly ninety per cent of chocolate's history it was a bitter drink and a unit of currency, consumed by Mesoamerican elites and then European aristocrats. The cheap, sweet, milky bar sold at every corner shop is the youngest chapter by far — a product of the industrial revolution, arriving only in the nineteenth century and reaching the masses later still, as mechanisation and falling sugar prices brought it within reach of ordinary pockets. The next time a bar snaps cleanly in two, it is worth remembering that this simple pleasure is younger than the railway, and that the people who first tasted cacao would have found it almost unrecognisable.
Quiz nuggets
- The cacao tree's Latin name, Theobroma cacao, means "food of the gods"; the Aztecs used cacao beans as currency.
- For most of its history chocolate was drunk, not eaten; the Spanish added sugar after bringing it to Europe in the sixteenth century.
- In 1828 the Dutchman Casparus van Houten patented a press that separated cocoa butter from cocoa solids, enabling cocoa powder.
- The first solid eating chocolate bar was made by J.S. Fry & Sons of Bristol in 1847.
- Milk chocolate was created in the 1870s by Daniel Peter using Henri Nestlé's condensed milk, and Rodolphe Lindt invented conching in 1879.