The cacao tree provides, with its seeds, the raw material for chocolate. Linnaeus, a chocolate-lover, assigned the species to a botanical genus which he named Theobroma, ‘food of the gods’. In this genus 22 species are now recognized, all native to C. and S. America, and two are cultivated. Theobroma bicolor is grown from Mexico to Brazil and produces pataxte, which can be drunk on its own or mixed with chocolate drinks. But vastly greater is the importance of T. cacao, the source of chocolate.
Cacao is the usual term for the tree and for its seeds (misleadingly, ‘cocoa’ has sometimes been used in English). A complex process of roasting, fermenting, and grinding turns these seeds into chocolate. Efficient extraction of cacao butter (a valuable and nutritious substance) leaves a residue which is marketed as ‘cocoa powder’ (see cocoa), or, mixed with sugar, as ‘drinking chocolate’.
Where cacao grows, the sweet pulp that surrounds the fresh seeds in their pod is a prized delicacy, whether eaten raw or fermented into an alcoholic drink. Green cacao pods used to be brought, as an expensive luxury, to the Aztec emperor at Tenochtitlan, far to the north-west of the cacao country.
The tree is indigenous to the region of Latin America that lies between S. Mexico and the northern Amazon basin. The cacao tree is an evergreen, achieving a height of 6–12 m (20–40′), depending on growing conditions. It is a prima donna, requiring shade when young, and susceptible to fungi and pests. Diseases are controlled by breeding resistant varieties; the one commonly used is the Forastero. The Criollo, grown by the Aztecs at the time of the Conquest, is delicate and little used today, although it produces finer beans. Hybrid varieties are also grown. Cacao is cultivated under banana or rubber trees which provide shade, and alternative sources of income if the cacao crop fails.
Cacao flowers, which are pollinated by a species of midge, grow directly on the trunk of the tree. Only a few flowers develop into fruit, or pods, an average annual yield being about 30 per tree. These are shaped like large, oval melons, saffron yellow or red depending on variety, and spring straight from the tree trunk. The tree produces pods and flowers simultaneously throughout the year, but commercial harvesting only takes place twice a year.
Ripe pods are collected, split, and the contents scraped out. The seeds, or beans, and their surrounding pulp are exposed to the sun making the pulp ferment. This step is essential for good flavour when the beans are used in chocolate manufacture (see below). Fermentation develops ‘flavour precursors’, breaking down sugar to glucose and fructose, and turning some protein into free amino acids and smaller peptides.
After fermentation the beans are dried and exported to manufacturers. They lose 50% of their weight during drying, the average annual yield of a single tree being no more than 0.5–1 kg (1–2 lb) of dried beans.
Cacao was well known to the classic Maya, whose remarkable civilization flourished and died in Yucatan and Guatemala in the 1st millennium ad. Alongside deceased Maya dignitaries were buried implements for use in the afterlife, including jars and bowls for chocolate. The identification of the word ka-ka-w in the inscriptions on these pots was a breakthrough in the decipherment of Maya phonetic writing. Moreover, traces of theobromine and caffeine, two active constituents of chocolate, have been found in some of them. An 8th-century painted vase shows chocolate being poured from a cylindrical jar, held high, into a bowl, thus demonstrating how the Maya raised froth in their chocolate: the froth was the most desirable part of the drink. They sometimes flavoured chocolate with chilli, with vanilla, and with other ingredients less easy to identify. They probably liked to drink their chocolate hot, as did the Maya of Spanish colonial times.
Linguists believe that cacao is in origin not a Maya but a Mixe-Zoquean word (perhaps kakawa), suggesting that the Maya learnt to use the product from the earlier Olmec culture, which flourished in the Veracruz and Tabasco provinces of Mexico between 1500 and 400 bc. Olmec hieroglyphs have not been deciphered, so we cannot read what they themselves said of cacao. No linguistic or archaeological evidence allows us to trace cacao or chocolate further back than this. The successor Izapan civilization spread Olmec culture, and perhaps cacao cultivation, to the Pacific littoral of Mexico and Guatemala: it was perhaps from the Izapans that the Maya would have learnt of chocolate.
Cacao will not grow everywhere where C. American civilizations flourished. Thus the beans became a commodity of trade, an object of warfare, and also a currency. By later Maya times long-distance traders had brought knowledge of chocolate to distant parts of Yucatan and also to the valley of Mexico, far to the west, where the Nahuatl-speaking Aztec were to establish their power. In due course cacao became a major source of the wealth of the Aztec merchants.
Aztec ‘puritanism’, however, linked with their reputed origins as poverty-stricken migrants from the north, led to an ambivalent attitude towards chocolate. One legend told of an expedition to retrace their steps, at the end of which the powerful emissaries of the Aztecs were told by the aged goddess of their ancestral home: ‘You have become old, you have become tired because of the chocolate you drink and because of the foods you eat. They have harmed and weakened you.’ But they did not stop drinking it, and huge quantities of cacao beans arrived as tribute in the valley of Mexico each year, both for use and for storage.
Like the Maya, the Aztecs frothed their chocolate by pouring it from vessel to vessel. They drank it from calabash gourds, or from cheaper earthenware; they liked it cold rather than hot, and invented new ways of flavouring it. By adding honey to their cacao they were apparently the inventors of sweetened chocolate, which almost the whole world now prefers. To the Aztecs, chocolate was a drink for warriors and the élite. The drinking of chocolate, like the smoking of tobacco, did not take place during a meal but immediately after it. Aztec soldiers on campaign were supplied with tablets of ground cacao, to be stirred into water as ‘instant chocolate’.
Chocolate lent itself to flavour mixtures. Both Maya and Aztecs mixed ground cacao with maize to make pinole, and made a different drink by mixing cacao butter with maize. Modern Mexicans still flavour chocolate, as the Aztecs did, with the petals of the ‘ear flower’, Cymbopetalum penduliflorum. The Aztecs liked to add the leaves or seeds of acuyo (Piper sanctum), petals of Magnolia mexicana, and several other herbs and flowers. Modern Mesoamerican peoples sometimes add black pepper, allspice, or annatto: the latter not only contributes flavour but colours the drinker's mouth red, a reminder of the link sometimes made in Mesoamerican thought between chocolate and blood.
To the Maya and the Aztecs the ceremonial importance of chocolate was profound. It was provided generously at the banquets at which noblemen and merchants displayed their wealth. It was offered to the gods, and was used to anoint newborn children on the forehead, face, fingers, and toes in a rite resembling baptism.
On his third voyage to the New World, on 15 August 1502, Columbus captured a Maya trading canoe laden with cacao beans and other produce. He may have learnt that the beans were money but he never found out that a drink was made from them.
However, when the Spaniards under Cortés invaded Yucatan and then the valley of Mexico itself, between 1517 and 1526, they soon realized the full value of the black ‘almonds’ (as they at first called them) of which so many millions were stored at Tenochtitlan. At first disgusted by the frothy, dark beverage that was present at every Aztec banquet and festival, the conquistadores soon learned to appreciate it. Rumour credited it with aphrodisiac properties (perhaps simply because it was taken in late evening, when the meal was over), and long argument would centre on the question whether chocolate was a food sufficiently nourishing to be ruled out during Lent. In contrast to the Aztec view of it as a drink for warriors, chocolate has sometimes been seen by Europeans as a woman's drink. This may have something to do with the fact that the conquistadores were taught to like it by their Mexican wives, concubines, and domestic servants. By 1590, ‘the Spanish men—and even more the Spanish women—are addicted to it’, wrote José de Acosta of his Mexican observations.
It was from an innovation of this period that the name chocolate originally comes. Hot water with a mixture of ground cacao and ground sapote kernels, maize, and other flavourings made a refreshing drink first described by the Spanish scientist Francisco Hernandez in the late 16th century. Its new name, chocolatl, appears to be a Spanish-inspired blend of Maya chocol ‘hot’ and Nahuatl atl ‘water’—an appropriate formation for the melting pot of cultures that was colonial Mexico. The word was soon applied to all the products of cacao.
The Spaniards in Mexico also appear to have invented a new means of producing the much-loved froth of drinking chocolate. Where Maya and Aztecs had achieved the effect by pouring, colonial Mexico developed the molinillo or swizzle stick, which required a chocolate pot with a well-fitting, pierced lid. Meanwhile cane sugar, introduced to America in early colonial times, became an ever more popular flavouring in chocolate drinks. Other flavourings, including cinnamon and anise, were also tried.
The reputation of chocolate travelled faster than the substance itself. It is mentioned in many early European works on botany, but this does not mean that it was actually available in Europe. Hence the dates that follow are later than those that will be found in some other reference books.
Chocolate is known to have reached the Old World by 1544, when a party of Kekchi Maya from Guatemala, led by Dominican friars, paid a visit to the future Philip II of Spain. They brought him chocolate, maize, and other New World products. As a commodity of trade, cacao beans began to reach Spain in 1585. In the 17th century the Spanish court was well known throughout Europe for its prowess in preparing chocolate drinks. Spain soon adopted the chocolate cup and saucer, mancerina, which had been invented in S. America—by the Marques de Mancera (Viceroy of Peru from 1639 to 1648) after he had seen a guest at a reception accidentally spill her clumsy traditional chocolate pot.
As an expensive, exotic spice, chocolate was gradually introduced to the rest of Europe with emphasis on its medicinal virtues. By 1644 chocolate was known at first hand to a Roman physician, Paolo Zacchia, who describes it as ‘a medicine brought here from Portugal not many years ago, to which it was sent from the Indies, called chacolata’. According to a Florentine chronicler, ‘a drink used in Spain called ciocolatto’ was first sold in Florence in 1668 ‘in little earthenware beakers, hot as well as cold according to taste’, and by then it was already known at the court of Cosimo III de' Medici. The Grand Duke's physician had written in 1666 of experiments with new flavourings for chocolate, including ambergris, musk, jasmine, citron peel, and lemon peel.
By the later 17th century Italian cooks had experience in the addition of chocolate as a flavouring to savoury and sweet dishes, including sorbets and ice creams. The poet Francisco Arisi, in ‘Il cioccolato’ (1736), detailed the over-use of chocolate in cookery:
One cook, running short of cheese in his kitchen, sprinkled two bolli of chocolate, well grated, on a fine polenta. The novelty was well received: the Apicii [gourmets] demanded the recipe. At a dinner I attended I found it made into a sauce, though, to tell the truth, it did not whet my appetite. It has been put into nougat; it has a place of honour in cakes; one day, no doubt, a cook will serve it with roast quail.
It was also in Italy that chocolate would reach its highest fame as a vehicle of poison (a reputation it already held in early colonial Mexico). Pope Clement XIV, who suppressed the chocolate-loving Jesuits in 1773, was widely believed to have been poisoned by way of a bowl of chocolate in the following year.
The first recorded chocolate-drinker in France, in the early 17th century, was Alphonse de Richelieu, elder brother of the more famous Cardinal. He used it ‘to moderate the vapours of his spleen’. In 1659 David Chaliou was granted a monopoly for selling chocolate throughout France. By 1671, according to the letters of Mme de Sévigné, chocolate was much in vogue at the court of Versailles, alternately praised for its medicinal virtues and blamed for unexpected side effects: ‘The Marquise de Coetlogon took so much chocolate during her pregnancy last year that she produced a baby as black as the Devil. It died.’
In the late 18th century the French still sometimes flavoured their chocolate with chilli, in the old Mexican and Spanish style, but they always added sugar and cinnamon and often vanilla. Martin Lister, a traveller of 1698, had already blamed the obesity of Parisian women on their habit of drinking sweetened chocolate. In the course of the 18th century French confectioners tried flavouring biscuits and sweetmeats with chocolate. The marquis de Sade was said to have given a ball at which were served chocolate pastilles laced with cantharides. He himself loved chocolate, and frequently wrote to his wife from prison demanding supplies of chocolate pastilles, biscuits, and cakes.
Chocolate was first sold in London about 1657 by a Frenchman with a shop in Gracechurch Street: he advertised it as ‘an excellent West India drink [which] cures and preserves the body of many diseases’. An enlightened entrepreneur, he not only sold chocolate ready to drink but offered to teach his customers how to make it themselves, with the help of a recipe book which they were encouraged to buy. The diarist Samuel Pepys, in the 1660s, several times recorded a morning drink of ‘Chocolatte’. It may have been in England that the use of milk in a chocolate drink first became popular. England's supply of chocolate came from the plantations of Jamaica, captured from the Spanish in 1655. By the end of the 17th century, chocolate was available in New England too.
The chocolate houses which sprang up in London at this period became fashionable meeting places, precursors of men's clubs: they had been briefly banned by Charles II in 1675 as hotbeds of radical politics. The Garrick Club began life as ‘The Cocoa-Tree Chocolate-House’ and was an early headquarters of the Jacobite party. White's originated in 1693 as ‘White's Chocolate House’, originally Whig, later Tory.
At the end of the 18th century chocolate remained a drink for the rich, and particularly for rich ladies. As such it figures in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. A maid enters carrying a chocolate pot and cups:
What an abominable life a lady's maid leads! Sweating, toiling, labouring from morning till night … and we get nothing out of it ourselves. I've been beating the chocolate for half an hour: now it's ready. Am I just to stand and smell it, my mouth dry? Isn't my mouth just as good as yours? O gracious mistresses, why should you get the real thing and I only the smell of it? By Bacchus, I'm going to taste it—Oh! It's good!
Through all this period, the preparation of chocolate for drinking remained very close to pre-Columbian practice. Toasting, winnowing, breaking, and grinding of the beans was highly labour intensive. In the 18th century there were 150 chocolate-grinders in Madrid. They plied their skilled trade from house to house, many drinkers preferring to keep a close eye on the quality and purity of their favourite drink by having it ground at home. The metate, the sloping stone on which chocolate beans were ground by hand, would still be familiar in 19th-century France and in 20th-century Spain and Italy.
As demand grew and the population of Mexico and Guatemala declined through disease and serfdom, other tropical countries began to be exploited as cacao producers. The Mesoamerican variety of cacao, originally the only one known in the Caribbean and the one that provided all the cacao of Europe up to the end of the 18th century, is called Criollo. It was this which now began to be cultivated in Venezuela, and in Jamaica, Trinidad, and several of the smaller W. Indian islands. In the 17th and 18th centuries Europe's supply came mainly from these Caribbean plantations and, in declining quantity, from America itself.
In Ecuador and in parts of the Amazon basin in the 17th century Spanish and Portuguese prospectors found a distinct variety of cacao—that now known as Forastero—growing wild, and succeeded in establishing plantations of it. From Brazil (where the Jesuits had controlled the trade) the Portuguese took seedlings of Forastero cacao to São Tomé and Fernando Po, off the coast of W. Africa. By the end of the 19th century cacao was being cultivated in several W. African countries, and by the early 20th century it had been planted in Sri Lanka, Malaya, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, the New Hebrides, and Samoa. W. Africa is now the world's main source of chocolate, and the bitter Forastero variety accounts for 80% of world production.
When the cacao of Trinidad was almost wiped out by a blight, it was supplemented with Forastero plantings. Soon afterwards the hybrid Trinitario variety emerged there, combining some of the flavour of Criollo with the hardiness of Forastero.
Already by the end of the 18th century there had been a perceptible increase in the amount of chocolate being eaten, in slabs and pastilles, in ices and sorbets, as an ingredient in desserts and main dishes, in pastas and soups. This was all full fat chocolate; the raw cacao bean is about 50% fat by weight. Attempts to reduce the fat content of chocolate during processing had been made in the late 17th century; but it was not until the Dutchman van Houten developed a screw press, patented in 1828, that real success was achieved. It removed about two-thirds of the cocoa butter from the chocolate paste, leaving a residue which became known as cocoa. This dispersed easily in water and was considered more digestible than full-fat chocolate. Alkalizing, or ‘Dutching’, was a process which also originated with van Houten, who found that treating cacao during processing with potassium carbonate led to a milder flavour and darker colour.
A use was soon found for the excess cocoa butter. Added to the ground beans it created a smooth paste which could be moulded, and was solid when cold, but melted easily in the mouth. By 1842 Cadbury Brothers were selling a block chocolate, described on their price list as ‘French’; and by 1847 Fry's were marketing ‘Chocolat Délicieux à Manger’. Prices remained high, due to import duty levied on cacao beans. This was reduced in 1853, and imports of cheap sugar also helped lower the price, but chocolate was still a luxury. Mrs Beeton (1861) instructed that chocolate, served in an ornamental box, should be placed on a glass plate as part of the dessert. Cocoa, now a cheap by-product, became the less desirable version of chocolate.
Major contributions made by the Swiss to the art of chocolate manufacture included that of Rodolphe Lindt, who in 1880 increased the amount of cocoa butter in his formula and developed the process of conching. In 1876 Swiss confectioner Daniel Peter produced the first milk chocolate, using dried milk, a new product manufactured by Henri Nestlé. It developed as a means of using milk in areas where it was cheap and plentiful. Milk and chocolate liquor were mixed, dried, and cocoa butter added. This is very similar to the modern ‘milk crumb’ process described in the section on chocolate manufacture below. The Swiss dominated the market for milk chocolate until the early 20th century.
Chocolate reached a wider audience when it was included amongst rations for troops during the First World War. Between the wars, the price of chocolate continued to fall as prices of materials fell, technological advances reduced manufacturing costs, and concentration in the industry brought economies of scale. By the dawn of the Second World War, chocolate confectionery was outselling sugar confectionery in England, and has continued to do so ever since.
Chocolate confectionery is a mixture of chocolate mass (processed cacao), cocoa butter, and sugar (see chocolate manufacture), often with additions of dairy produce and other confectionery.
Block chocolate, for eating or incorporation into other foods or drinks, is the primary manifestation of chocolate confectionery. That sold in Britain comes in three basic types: plain, or dark, which is a mixture of chocolate mass, cocoa butter, and sugar; milk chocolate, which includes milk solids and has a lower proportion of chocolate mass; and white, which is not really chocolate as it contains no mass, but is a mixture of cocoa butter, milk solids, sugar, and flavourings. In continental Europe and N. America, ‘plain’ chocolate is subdivided into categories of sweet, semi-sweet, and bitter-sweet. Unsweetened chocolate, which is hardened chocolate mass, is used by confectioners and bakers.
Nuts, dried fruit, biscuits, wafers, and sugar confectionery are often added to chocolate.
Chocolates, or pralines as they are called in parts of continental Europe, are sweetmeats made by coating small pieces of sugar confectionery or nuts with melted chocolate. Popular fillings include fondant flavoured with fruit, coffee, or mint; marzipan; toffees or caramel; and praline, mixed with chocolate to give a nut-flavoured paste.
Chocolates can be made by hand dipping. In theory this is simple, the centres being lowered on a special ‘dipping fork’ into molten chocolate, covered, and then deposited on paper to set. In fact, this skill takes years to learn properly. This method is mostly used by craft confectioners, for whom investment in production line methods would be expensive, but who wish to produce high-quality, individual chocolate selections. There are two automated methods for making chocolates: enrobing, in which the centres are transported under a curtain of molten chocolate, and shell moulding, which is time consuming and therefore more expensive. For this, molten chocolate is deposited in moulds to form the shell, which is then filled; a lid of chocolate seals the filling in before the chocolate is unmoulded. This method gives a better finish and allows for more elaborate shapes than enrobing. It is used for shapes such as Easter eggs and other novelties.
Liqueur chocolates, which magically enclose liquids, can be made by shell moulding, or by depositing the syrup into impressions made in trays of starch. Left undisturbed for some time, the syrup ‘crusts’ (by forming sugar crystals on all surfaces) and can be lifted out and enrobed. Another method for making chocolates with semi-liquid syrup fillings relies on the use of an enzyme to act on solid sugar centres after they have been coated with chocolate.
Other confections include truffles: these are based on ganache, a paste of chocolate and cream or butter with flavourings of spirits, nuts, or essences. Chocolate is used for panned sweets or dragées, either as centres which are coated with thin, crunchy sugar shells, or to cover dried fruits and nuts. For the latter, chocolate is sprayed onto centres rotating in revolving pans; cool air is blown over them to harden them.
Chocolate is popularly perceived as comforting, and perhaps ‘addictive’; and maintains a reputation as an aphrodisiac. How much of this image is due to intrinsic properties, and how much to clever marketing and associations with luxury and pleasure, is debatable. The basic combination, in chocolate, of fat and sugar is well calculated to give pleasure. And chocolate does contain phenylethylamine, a naturally occurring chemical in the human brain, responsible for the euphoric feelings associated with being in love. However, experiments to discover whether eating chocolate has a measurable effect on this aspect of body chemistry have proved inconclusive.
Chocolate also contains theobromine, a stimulant which acts on the muscles; and caffeine (but in much smaller quantities than tea or coffee). This stimulant effect was noticed by early European consumers such as Thomas Gage (1648), who drank chocolate when he wished to work late at night.
Finally, chocolate is nutritious: depending on the formula (milk or plain) it yields up to 600 calories of energy per 100 g (3.5 oz), mostly in the form of fat and sugar, useful amounts of protein, and iron. Because it is such a concentrated food source, it features in the survival kits of soldiers and mountaineers.
Perhaps for these reasons the term ‘chocolate’ has acquired in some parts of the world a much more general meaning: something sweet which is easy to eat from the hand. This is true in Kazakhstan, where ‘Kazakh chocolate’ (zhent) turns out to be a block of sweet matter made from millet, curd cheese, sugar, raisins, and butter (with not a whiff of even a chocolate substitute). And in Afghanistan children who are offered toffees will exclaim delightedly: ‘chocolates!’
has been an important industry in W. Europe since the late 18th century. Some great names in chocolate manufacture—Dröste, van Houten (Holland); Lindt, Suchard (Switzerland); Menier (France); and Fry, Cadbury, Rowntree (England)—can trace their history back to the mid-19th century and often earlier. Chocolate is manufactured in the USA by Walter Baker and Co. (founded 1779) and by Hershey. A curious aspect of chocolate manufacture, at least in England, is the link with nonconformist religions, the three principal companies all being founded by Quaker families.
Chocolate manufacture is a complex process, requiring substantial investment in machinery. The raw material is cacao (see the section on botany and early history above) which is imported from the country of origin as fermented, dried beans. Over 30 varieties are available, and the manufacturer's first concern may be blending, using several varieties of bean to produce the desired flavour.
After cleaning, the first process in manufacture is roasting. This is important for developing flavour, and reduces moisture content to a level appropriate during later processing. It also facilitates removal of the shells from the beans during the next process, winnowing, when they are cracked between rollers, and the husks removed, leaving only the kernels or nibs. The nib (the cotyledon of the seed) is the part of the bean used for chocolate and cocoa manufacture. It may be further treated by alkalizing, altering flavour and colour.
Then the nib is reduced to a paste by grinding. Originally stone mills, echoing the Aztec use of stone implements for chocolate preparation, were employed, but now metal mills with sophisticated temperature controls are used. Temperature is important because the heat produced by friction during grinding releases the fat, or cocoa butter, from the nib. The mass emerges from the grinder in a liquid state known as chocolate liquor, chocolate mass, or pâte.
This liquor is the essential ingredient for chocolate manufacture. It is often made by individual manufacturers.
Cooled and hardened, the liquor becomes basic unsweetened chocolate. Some liquor is used to make cocoa; this is done by pressing it to release more cocoa butter, and grinding the residue to powder. (The extra cocoa butter is used to enrich liquor during chocolate production.)
For plain chocolate, liquor is mixed with powdered sugar. Cocoa butter is added to adjust the consistency. A stiff paste emerges and goes for refining, which reduces the size of the particles in the mixture, so that they are imperceptible to the palate. The mass is passed through a series of steel rollers, each of which rotates faster than the one before. These have a shearing action and the mass emerges almost as powder.
The next process is conching. This is said to have gained its name from the shell-like shape of the ‘conche’, a long, heated stone trough, curved at each end. It was fitted with a roller to work the chocolate mass back and forth at a temperature of 55–85 °C (131–85 °F), constantly turning the chocolate and exposing fresh surfaces to the air. During conching flavour develops, moisture content is lowered further, and more fat is squeezed out of the cocoa particles. Stone conches are still used, as well as modern rotary conches which knead the mass intensively. Conching may take from several hours to a week, depending on the quality required. Towards the end of conching and desired flavourings are added. Vanilla is the most common in European and N. American chocolate. Others often used are mint, orange, and coffee.
Chocolate couverture is chocolate with a very high cocoa butter content, intended as a long shelf-life product for bakers and craft confectioners. Milk solids may also be added. It is specially prepared for coating, and manufactured so that at a given temperature it will cover evenly, but not flow off centre. (The term ‘couverture’ can cause confusion, since it was used in England to describe a cheap product from which most of the cocoa butter has been removed and replaced by hydrogenated fat and a stabilizer. This is now called chocolate-flavoured covering.)
Milk chocolate is usually made by the ‘milk crumb’ process. Fresh milk, concentrated to a solids content of 30–40% is used; sugar is added and the mixture further condensed, under vacuum, to a dry-matter content of about 90%. This is mixed with chocolate liquor, giving a stiff mixture which is dried and broken up. Processing then follows the same steps (adding cocoa butter, mixing, and refining, and conching) as for plain chocolate. Conching for milk chocolate takes place at a lower temperature (45–60 °C/113–40 °F) for a longer time; this prevents the lactose (milk sugar) from aggregating and giving a lumpy consistency.
After conching, the chocolate mass, plain or milk, is used for chocolate confectionery (see the section on chocolate in the 19th and 20th centuries above). However, before being moulded, the chocolate has to be stabilized, or tempered, by heating to a temperature of 49–50 °C (120–2 °F), and then cooling it, whilst stirring, to about 29 °C (84 °F) for plain, or 28 °C (82 °F) for milk. The object of this process is to ‘seed’ the mixture with cocoa butter crystals of a uniform and stable type, which will keep well during storage. If nuts, dried fruit, biscuit, etc. are to be added, they go in at this stage. The mixture, warmed slightly, is then deposited in moulds, shaken to remove air bubbles, and chilled, before unmoulding and wrapping.
Chocolate is best stored at temperatures below 18 °C (64 °F), to prevent undesirable changes (such as the formation of a harmless but unsightly whitish ‘bloom’) in the cocoa butter crystals.
In Europe and N. America chocolate is an important flavouring for puddings, desserts, baked goods, and ice creams. It combines well with nuts, fruits, orange, mint, coffee, and spirits.
In the form of cocoa, it provides a concentrated chocolate flavour for cakes, biscuits, and icings, and is sometimes added to pastry. Block chocolate is used for richer cakes, and to flavour creams, mousses, soufflés, sauces, and ice cream.
Some famous confections include chocolate by definition. Examples are Sachertorte, Black Forest gateau, devil's food cake, Poires belle Hélène, éclairs, florentines, brownies, and chocolate chip cookies.
The foregoing are all sweet items. N. Europeans, who think of chocolate exclusively in terms of sweetness, are often surprised to discover that it can be used to flavour savoury dishes, especially sauces for game. The pre-Columbian Americans who were the first to use chocolate would have been equally surprised, for they would have regarded a use of this sort as sacrilege (see mole on this point, and also for an example of later Mexican use of chocolate as an ingredient in a savoury sauce).
In Europe it seems to have been the Italians who first explored such possibilities. There are firmly dated Italian recipes of the 1680s which reflect such novel experimentation. This became so widespread that an Italian poet cited by Coe and Coe (1996) in a poem listed among those who misused the beverage cacao not only those who misguidedly blow the froth off their cups, or take snuff with it, or mix it with coffee, but also those who put it into meat pasties and kindred dishes.
It may have been from Italy that the idea passed to France. It made an early appearance there in Massialot (1691) as ‘Wigeon in a ragout with chocolate’, but this recipe seems to have been swiftly forgotten.
The Spanish have been more consistent in taking up the idea. They continue to make ‘Catalan-style’ dishes which are sometimes seasoned with chocolate. Chocolate is also still used, in small amounts, in Italy in salsa agrodolce (sweet-sour sauce), which is served with boar and hare. In Latin America, it is used more widely, perhaps reflecting Spanish influence as much as or more than any post-Columbian indigenous tradition.
Chocolate must be melted gently, using a bain-marie, a slow oven, or a microwave on a low setting. If it gets too hot (over 44 °C, 111 °F), the flavour is impaired and it ‘seizes’—goes hard and grainy.
Sophie Coe was the author of America's First Cuisines and co-author with her husband of A True History of Chocolate.
Andrew Dalby has written essays and books about food in classical times, especially Siren Feasts, on food and gastronomy in classical Greece.
Laura Mason has written about several aspects of British food in books including Sugar Plums and Sherbet (1998), Farmhouse Cookery (2005), and Traditional Foods of Britain (1999), which she co-authored with Catherine Brown.
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Coe, Sophie and Coe, Michael (1996), The True History of Chocolate, London: Thames & Hudson.
Constant, Christian (1988), Le Chocolat, Paris: Nathan.
Gage, Thomas (1648), Travels in the New World, ed J. E. S. Thompson, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (1958).
Massialot, M. (1691), Le Cuisinier roial et bourgeois, Paris: Charles de Sercy.
Presilla, Maricel E. (2001), The New Taste of Chocolate, Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press.
Richardson, Paul (2004), Indulgence: One Man's Search for the Best Chocolate, London: Abacus.
Rosenblum, Mort (2005), Chocolate, New York: North Point Press.
Stanes, Sara Jayne (1999), Chocolate: The Definitive Guide, London: Grub Street.
