Where does the chocolate come from ?

What happened ? #4

Feb 05, 2021

Cocoa was originally cultivated in South America at least 3000 years ago. At this time, pharaohs had already constructed pyramids ! They could have enjoyed a nice chocolate bar…

Cocoa beans had a great importance in the Maya culture: they were used as currency or for rituals such as weddings or sacrifices to the gods.

But did the Maya transform cocoa beans into chocolate at that time?

Well, not really. The Maya did not eat much cocoa because it was reserved for the richest. At that time, they consumed it in the form of a drink that is called the chocolatl.

You can all see the link between chocolatl and chocolate, right ?

But chocolatl did not look at all like the chocolate we know. Firstly, it was a drink and it was not sweetened at all. It was even downright bitter and spicy because the Maya added a lot of chilli pepper in it.

So when the Spanish settlers discovered these beans and this drink it was clearly not an eye-opener for them. Some even would have said that it was "more a drink for pigs than for men". I should also add that, at the time, Europeans were very fond of sugar, so this drink was defintely not to the taste of the Spanish settlers.

There’s even a rumor that Christopher Columbus threw the cocoa beans he had into the sea because he thought they were goat droppings!

After the Spanish conquests of the Aztec and Mayan territories, the two culinary cultures began to mix. Spanish men married local women and brought products that they knew and loved such as cinnamon, sugar cane, honey, etc. As a result, instead of adding chili to the chocolate, the settlers started adding honey and sugar to make it more to their taste.

But how did chocolate later find its way to Europe?

Actually it was a Spanish doctor, Hernandez, who helped bring chocolate to Europe. He had been sent by the King of Spain to the New World because it was said that there were many medicinal plants there, and that's where he discovered chocolatl. He then decided to classify it as a medicine, according to the criteria of this period. Nowadays, try to ask your pharmacist for chocolate to heal your cold and tell us how he responds to you!

Thus, chocolate arrived in Europe in the 16th century and spread to all the courts of the nobility. However, at that time, chocolate was a delicacy, only consumed by the rich in Europe. It was only with the industrial revolution that chocolate changed from a liquid form reserved for the rich to a solid product consumed in bulk.

Many innovations were needed to come from chocolate in liquid form to the different products we know nowadays :

In 1821, Cadbury produced the first hard dark chocolate,
In 1828, van Houten made the first cocoa powder,
In 1836, Meunier invented the concept of the chocolate bar,
In 1879, Lindt invented conching, a process that makes it possible to have melting chocolate,
And finally in the 1930s, Nestlé invented white chocolate,

As you can see chocolate went through a lot of changes from the cocoa drink that was made by the Mayas and Aztecs to the cocoa powder, chocolate bars and hot chocolate that we have now.

In a future article, I will write more about our current consumption and its social and environmental consequences !

Thank you for your attention ! Don’t hesitate to like, comment and share this article !

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