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How did it all begin?

A thousand years ago somewhere in Central America a Maya Indian picks an odd shaped fruit from the trunk of a tree with smooth bark deep into the rain forest. Perhaps this fruit had just started to decay and the normally very refreshing pulp that surrounds the almond shaped beans had started to ferment, the beans had maybe even dried up a little bit. In his disappointment the Indian spits the beans out and throws the rest of the fruit into the fire. When the beans get roasted over the fire a pleasant scent start to diffuse in the forest, the scent of what we today associate with newly baked brownies or hot chocolate. Maybe this is how our more than a thousand year old relation to chocolate all begun?

The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the capacities of the cocoa bean and the beginning of chocolate remain a mystery. Various books have been filled with details about the promised cocoa bean and historians have for a long time debated on the etymology of the word chocolatl, or xocoatl. From "bitter water" in the Aztec language Nahuatl, to "hot water" in Mayan, or simply just an amalgamation of the "choco-choco sound" that emerged in the grinding process and the word "atl" which means water in several Mexican native languages. This still remains a controversial question today. The word cacao on the other hand offers a more unanimous agreement and is considered deriving from the Aztec word cacahuatle, which in turn corresponds to the Olmec civilization's use of the word kakaw around 1000 B.C.

Chocolate, cacao and cocoa etymology

Columbus tastes chocolate

The use and ability to enjoy the fruits of the cacao tree is accordingly believed to be more than 2,500 years old, when people mainly utilized the refreshing sweet and slightly acidic viscous pulp surrounding the beans inside the pod, which in many respects resembles sweet and sour pick-and-mix candy or all but ripe gooseberries. It was used to prepare a drink, and still is in some parts of Latin America. Merchants of the Olmecs and Maya hauled highly prized cocoa beans and salt from the Mesoamerican heartlands to cities as far away as present-day El Salvador and Mexico City, returning with quetzal feathers, pyrite, obsidian and jade for tools, jewelry and work of art. When Christopher Columbus as the very first European to have tasted a variation of the bitter cocoa drink which the Mayas referred to as xocoatl, it is said that he spit it out in disgust. This coincided with his disembarkation at the island Guanaja outside the Honduran coast during his fourth journey to the New World A.D. 1502 Despite this incident he brought cocoa beans back to the Spanish royal court; however King Ferdinand V didn't show much appreciation in the bean, probably owing to Columbus lack of knowledge when it comes to preparing it.

In Mesoamerica cocoa drinks were frequently prepared from dried and roasted cocoa beans which had been grounded into a thick and coarse paste on a metate, a flat mortar or grinding stone. The paste was flavored with various herbs and spices, such as flower petals, seeds, vanilla, chilies, honey, corn flour or colorants to produce certain qualities. Then the paste was shaped into tablets to be solidified, thus the drink could easily be prepared by dissolving a tablet in hot or cold water and whipped until frothy. The essential cap of foam on top of the chocolate was, and still is, generated with the help of a molinillo, a long wooden whisk with rings attached to the bottom that spin when the whisk is rubbed between the palms. The foam could also be obtained by alternate pouring of the drink back and forth from the drinking cup and the pot, from a distance of several feet. The purpose of the foam on top of the chocolate drink is partly to minimize the skin that forms on its surface, but also because the foam is said to embody the chocolate's spirit.

Old tools used to prepare chocolate

The potential chocolate

At a certain occasion almost exactly 500 years ago Columbus encountered a canoe which came from one of the Maya tribes of the Yucatán peninsula in south eastern Mexico. The canoe contained valuable cargo that the Spaniards off course laid hands upon, but also a lot of junk in the shape of something the Spaniards perceived as almonds. While reloading the cargo they dropped some of the "almonds" and Columbus's young son Fernando noticed that the Indians jumped at them. The Spaniards then slowly realized that the beans were most certainly valuable in some way, which was confirmed additionally when the conquistador Hernán Cortéz opened the Aztec ruler Moctezuma's treasury. Confident of finding it full of gold and other precious metals and gems he found slightly more than 1 billion cocoa beans! Now the Spaniards realized the potentials and shipped the beans to Europe. In this manner the cocoa bean was sent on from the Olmecs, through the Mayas and the Aztecs, and finally to Europe in the 16th century.

The chocolate drink was not an immediate success in Spain even though Cortéz brought with him the knowledge of how to prepare it. It would still be a few more decades before the Europeans began to appreciate this "junk". Not until Spanish nuns at the Guanaco convent in South America, sometime between A.D. 1530 and 1540, found that the chocolate drink could be improved by adding sugar and vanilla was it seriously starting to be appreciated in Europe. Spain established a monopoly together with their American colonies which prohibited the colonies to trade on their own with other countries outside the Hispanic hemisphere. They managed to maintain the monopoly, which Inter alia included cocoa beans, for almost 100 years and the procedure how to prepare the chocolate drink was kept a closely guarded secret. In 1606 the monopoly ceased which made it easier for other countries to get hold of the cocoa beans and manufacture chocolate of their own, without having to trade through Spain.

The Spanish cocoa monopoly

The chocolate conquers Europe

By now cocoa as a beverage was conquering Europe through the royal courts and the noblesse. Small chocolate houses where appearing all over where people were enjoying this new fashionable drink which was said to bear aphrodisiac and salubrious properties. However it would still pass by another 300 years until it would take the shape as how we know it today. The drink was thick and with an acrid and oleaginous tone to it since 50% of the cocoa beans consists of fat. They tried to get rid of the bitterness and oiliness by adding flour from wheat, corn or oat. The crude and coarse chocolate offered in the shape of tablets in the shops was meant for preparing drinking chocolate, hot chocolate, and was not for eating. This is still how it is mostly sold and distributed in Mexico and the majority of Latin America today. In 1838 the Dutchman Coenraad van Houten revolutionized the whole chocolate industry by inventing a hydraulic press. This press could get rid of 2/3 of the fat, the cocoa butter, and offered huge advantages. On one hand it was possible to extract cocoa butter to be used in the process of making chocolate for eating, and on the other hand you could obtain cocoa by grinding the cocoa cake, the remains in the press, into a fine cocoa powder. This very same Dutchman also discovered a way to neutralize or alkalize this cocoa powder using the alkali solution potash (potassium carbonate) to allow it to stay in suspension longer in liquids such as milk. This alkalizing process is called dutching.

Swedish chocolate manufacturing started more than 150 years ago and factory processing began in 1872 in the south eastern city of Malmö when the Swiss (not Swedish) Cloetta brothers built their Ång-Choklad-Fabrik (Steam-Chocolate-Factory). Another Swiss discovered how to obtain milk solids, i.e. powdered milk and in this manner the first milk chocolate bar was born. Lately the interest in darker chocolates with a higher percentage of cocoa solids has increased, especially in the western hemisphere.

Source: Young, A M. 1994. The chocolate tree - a natural history of cacao. Washington:Smithsonian Institution Press

In English I På svenska

A royal Mesoamerican drink that seals a wedding by being shared by the bridal couple in the 13th century. The Aztecs referred to this bitter, coarse and watery drink as xocoatl and shared it with Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortéz, who on his part helped to spread the precious cocoa bean to the Caribbean and Africa. He also introduced drinking chocolate in Spain in 1528.

Choklad
historia

Choklad
Historik