From Susan’s Newest BOOK: Fun Foods of America
The story of how chocolate became an American darling and an international sensation starts with the ancient Olmecs and threads its way around the world.
Olmecs: What most of us know about the Olmecs is their sculptures of immense stone gods, with broad, well-defined noses, full lips and enormous, focused eyes… and, possibly, their stealth in making chocolate. The multi-step process started with pods from the chocolate tree and ended with a paste which formed into hard cakes.
Mayans: The Mayans cultivated the cacao tree, moving into the region now known as Guatemala. The Mayas held chocolate in great esteem – in death, the aristocrats were buried with great quantities of it for the afterlife; while living, a spicy, frothy cacao drink was their greatest culinary pleasure. As for the poor – they ate a porridge-like blend of cacao mixed with maize and spices, such as chili pepper or milder vanilla and dried flowers.
Aztecs: As the cacao-loving Aztecs lived in a dry region, they were unable to grow the cacao themselves. So, they obtained it through trade or a “tribute,” a tax paid in cacao bean by the provinces they had captured. For the Aztecs, the cacao was also, quite literally, money hence the expression “money doesn’t grow on trees.” A large tomato was worth one cacao bean; a turkey egg, 3 beans; a rabbit, 100 beans; a slave, 1000 beans; and a prostitute, a paltry 8.
Chocolate, Europe, and Inevitable Sex
The Spanish: In 1517, Spanish explorers led by Hernan Cortez discovered cacao. They also discovered the great king Montezuma, made even greater through the creative talents of fellow traveler and Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo. From his notes about the journey, we learned the improbable truth that Montezuma drank 50 chalices of chocolate a day to get the sexual stamina necessary to satisfy his 200 wives. That story endured, igniting an unshakable, albeit debatable belief in chocolate’s aphrodisiac powers.
Cacao Goes to Spain: The Spanish colonists made Mexico their home, and with it they took native women as wives, concubines, or some variation of lover. Back in Spain, the Spanish kept chocolate a secret, leaving all the more for them. By the late 1500s, monks and nuns in their respective monasteries and nunneries were making a chocolate drink, adding spices such as nutmeg and sugar which were, ironically or not, considered aphrodisiacs. They even got an idea so innovative it lasted to this day: serve the cold drink hot. Gradually, word about chocolate spread as royal families in one nation married those in another bringing chocolate with them.
The England-Sex-Chocolate Link. Chocolate and Coffee houses opened in England in the mid- 1600s. Chocolate’s sexual personae endured, as is evident in Chocolate, Or, An Indian Drinke published by Captain James Wadsworth. Here is an excerpt:
’Twill make Old women Young and Fresh; Create New-Motions of the Flesh, And cause them long for you know what, If they but Tast of Chocolate.
Let Bawdy-Baths be us’d no more; Nor Smoaky-Stoves but by the whore Of Babilon: since Happy-Fate Hath Blessed us with Chocolate.
Chocolate Goes to Boston
Chocolate appeared in Boston in the 1660s when merchant John Hull announced he was trading in cocoa and, in 1670, when Dorothy Jones and Jane Barnard requested permission to “keepe a house of publique Entertainment for the selling of Coffee and Chucalettoe [sic]” 1 Permission granted, licenses given. In the following years, chocolate became standard fare in public establishments. Early Bostonians had mixed views about chocolate. Some enjoyed it but others considered it too enjoyable to be respectable.
Revolutionary Chocolate
In 1764 John Hannon, an Irish immigrant, started the first chocolate mill in Dorchester, Massachusetts, turning the cacao bean into the makings of a coveted, if not bitter, drink. Hannon was brilliant but not entirely business-like and not at all wealthy. So, he brought in James Baker, a wealthy Harvard College graduate and businessman for help. The Colonists clearly appreciated this effort: in 1773, Hannon produced about 900 pounds of chocolate. The Hannon-Baker partnership ended for reasons unknown. The business was renamed “Baker’s Chocolate” forever confusing people who thought the brand was made for bakers. At that time – and still today – chocolate was valued for its flavor and medicinal properties.
The Rise of Chocolate (But not in the U.S.)
In the 1800s, chocolate innovations were on the rise but not in the U.S. With the onset of the Civil War, American production halted altogether. Meanwhile, over in England, chocolatiers were approaching chocolate-making with zeal, inventing everything from the chocolate bar (Fry family) to milk chocolate (Daniel Peter and Henri Nestle) to a machine that made gritty candy smoother (Adolphe Lindt).
Chocolate Back in the U.S.
By the late 1800s, American chocolate makers were hard at work creating chocolate of their own. Then, as now, they couldn’t completely separate themselves from European enterprises. American chocolates were voluptuous, yes, but the best ones were French. By “French,” the chocolates weren’t necessary from France, but were in the “French style” – a marketing ploy for candies invented and created in the U.S.A.
By the early 1900s, American chocolate came into its own, with thousands of small chocolate makers spanning the nation, many locally based, communities too small to make the history books. Large companies such as Hershey’s Chocolate (1894), and Mars (1911 as Mar-O-Bar Co.) made their mark with tidal waves of marketing that endure today.
