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History of Chocolates |
| "Where there is cacao, there is life." Cacao Worker, Paria Peninsula |
| The days before... | Egyptian tombs dating back to 2600BC bear inscriptions which indicate that book keeping for honey was widely practiced, although the honey was reserved for the rich and powerful.
By 1566BC the Egyptians were already making sweetmeats, but sugar as we know it today was unknown and the sweetening basis of confections was still honey.
Sugar in crystalline form was first produced from the can in India at the start of the Christian era. By AD 500, white sugar was introduced into Persia and Arabia. The original Persian word for sugar was "kandisfid" and the East Indian word was "shekar" - hence the derivation of the words candy and sugar.
|  | | The Art of Confectionery | Although the art of confectionery making began in the Middle East, it is to the French that we are mainly indebted for the development of the confectionery trade. They produced the first dragee (a small sugar coated almond used for cake decoration) in 1600; the first praline in 1650; nougat in Montelimar in 1701 and the first revolving pan in 1850. Marzipan however was invented in Germany. Sweetened condensed milk was first produced in the USA in 1866. Caramel came to North America from Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean countries in the early 1800's and was brought to England in 1833 from America by R.S. Murray. A little John McIntosh evolved the cream toffee.
| | When the world knows... | The cacao tree, indigenous to the Amazon and Orinoco forest of South America, was cultivated by the Maya and Aztecs long before the discovery of the New World. Columbus first introduced the cacao bean to Europe after his fourth voyage (1502) but it was his fellow countryman Cortez who first realized its probable commercial value. Motezuma, Emperor of the Aztecs, is alleged to have drunk great quantities of the mixing beverage "chocolatl", prepared by whisking cakes of a mixture of ground roasted cocoa beans, corn and spices with water. The Aztecs believed the cacao tree to be of divine origin and it was probably for this reason that Linnaeus, the eighteenth century Swedish botanist gave the name Theobroma - Food of the Gods - to the genus which includes the cacao species.
The Maya people of Central America were the first to grow cocoa. They roasted and ground the beans, then mixed them with water, maize meal, vanilla and chili to make a frothy, bitter drink called chocolatl. Cocoa beans were so highly prized the Mayans used them as currency and traded them with the Aztecs of Mexico. Aztec methodology says that the staple foods of the gods were maize and chocolatl. The Spanish version of chocolatl, with added cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar, but without the chili, became the fashionable drink of the the Spanish Court.
Chocolate spread to France in 1615, England in the 1650's and Belgium, Germany and Switzerland by the end of the 17th century to become a popular drink of the day. This chocolate was far from the drink that we enjoy today, being scummy, fatty and difficult to digest. But in 1828 Dutchman CJ Van Houten invented the cocoa press which removed the excess fat or cocoa butter. By mixing the resulting chocolate mass with sugar and adding back the cocoa butter, modern eating chocolate was created in 1847.
Chocolate was finally made smoother and able to melt with the invention of conching (chocolate rolling) in 1880 and the addition of extra cocoa butter. But this was still only plain chocolate Milk chocolate was first created in 1875 by Daniel peter who had a chocolate factory next door to Henri Nestles milk factory. Daniel followed Henri's experiments in drying milk and the results of these allowed him to successfully add milk and chocolate together to create milk chocolate During World War 2, chocolate was found to be an energy source and so was issued to all Australian and New Zealand troops.
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