The History of Chocolate

Nowadays chocolate is popular across the world, but it got its start thousands of years ago in Mesoamerica, where it was much more than a mere sweet or ingredient in desserts. Learn more about the history of chocolate in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And today we're
talking chocolate because you know, October is coming up as

(00:21):
we keep on mentioning, and I know a lot of
you are going to be eating chocolate pretty soon. You're
probably already snatching up this Reese's multi packs at the store. Well,
and for us, it's late afternoon, which, of course is
that like crash chocolate time of day during the work
that Yeah, I just finished my peanut butter Eminem's but
my favorite. I love Dove and I love Godiva, but
I'm really more of a salty person. But for purposes

(00:43):
of this podcast, you, I'm I'm very into chocolate because
of course we're talking about the history of chocolate. But
I have a question. So you've admitted you like chocolate
well enough, if you were about to be sacrificed and
you didn't quite feel up to dancing before or your
own death, would you maybe feel a little bit better
if somebody gave you a chocolate drink kind of perk

(01:05):
you up? Uh, you know, I'm I think I'm going
to have to go with a no. And that it
might have blood of like previously sacrificed victims in it.
Does that add a little enticement? I mean, if I
if I could have a nice Coca cola instead, is
that an option? I don't think, so chocolate or nothing. Katie, Well,
I'm not an as tech, so surely that's not the

(01:27):
case for me. Because this information was according to Chloe,
do to russell Um and these Aztec sacrifice victims got
a gourd of chocolate mixed with victims blood to you know,
perk them up if they were depressed for being human sacrifices.
Don't think that would do it for me. I think
I'd still feel pretty sad. And there's cocoa in the

(01:47):
break room, it doesn't have blood in it. I think
I'm already set. I'd rather not be sacrificed. But this
gives you a clue perhaps that the history of chocolate
is a lot less sweet than it might seem. So
let's get down to basics and talk about where we
get chocolate In the first place, that would be from
the plant cow, and chocolate starts with this equatorial tree

(02:10):
that grows fruit not from the tips of its branches
like most trees, but from its trunk and from its
really thick branches. It's very bizarre. I would definitely recommend
early in this podcast you go and google the cocao
tree to see exactly what this looks like. Yeah, and
it's The tree is called the fia Broma cocaw and
its scientific name means food of the gods. And it

(02:33):
produces this small fruit with white pulp and seeds that we,
of course often call beans. And when we make chocolate today,
the initial processing is much like it's always been. The
seeds are harvested by hand. They're fermented for about a
week and then dried and roasted. And things have changed
a lot beyond that step. But Sarah is going to

(02:53):
tell you what usually happens today. Yeah. Usually after roasting,
the beans are winnowed, which means the nib of the
bean is removed from the husk, and then from mary
you can use the husk as garden compost or animal feed.
It smells really good still, and the nibs are ground
into a liquid called chocolate liquor. And we have an
article on the site called how Chocolate Works, and the

(03:15):
author Marshall Brain compares this to how if you grind
up solid peanuts, it makes liquid e peanut butter. If
you're having a hard time imagining how a liquor comes
from this hard, dried up nib. So if you let
that harden, if you let that mixture you've created harden,
you have pure chocolate, pure, very bitter chocolate. Not the

(03:38):
kind of thing you would want to eat, but maybe
you would want to bake with it. And if you
want to keep going though make it something palatable, you
can keep processing it, running it through a coco press
to remove the fat. And this leaves you with two
main products. One is cocoa butter, which of course is
used in a lot of cosmetic products. Yeah, there's cocoa solids,

(03:59):
which you grind those up. Then you have cocoa powder.
And then finally we get to the point where we
can add good stuff like sugar and milk solids and
flavors like vanilla, and you can perform further treatments to
make the consistency nice, smooth, delicious chocolate e kind of
thing we're used to, and also to treat it so

(04:20):
it all sticks together so it doesn't crumble into gross
dust when you bite into the candy or um. But
the really old one. Yeah, but those are the advanced treatments,
the advanced ways that we produce chocolate today, to produce
eating chocolate. But for almost its entire history, chocolate has
not been a food. It's been a drink. And part

(04:42):
of why we picked this topic is because of National
Hispanic Heritage Month, because chocolate is very much a Mesoamerican creation.
So we're going to start with a tall ceramic cylinder
of frothy chocolate foam, which was the stuff the classic
period Maya would drink back around two fifty. And this

(05:04):
beverage isn't close to anything that we would recognize, not
the cocoa in the breakroom. No, it was made from
cocaw beans that have been fermented, dried, and roasted before
being ground into a paste. And this paste was hardened
into a cake that was then crumbled into water and
poured back and forth to infuse it with air and
make this filmy froind of like a waterfall that actually

(05:25):
stand up and pour it from a height so it
would just get as much air in there as pike
picturing cocktail shakers. Um. It would sometimes contain flowers, herbs,
spices or vanilla, but it was very, very bitter, like
if you mixed baking chocolate with water. That's the closest
approximation you could make now. But it was a very

(05:45):
special drink and it was favored by the royalty even then.
Though it was still something that most people could drink
on occasion. It was a special pain. It was pretty
comparable to champagne. Actually, something you would drink at birth
or weddings or sell brations, and archaeological evidence showed that
most people had a tree growing in their yard, so

(06:05):
it was something that people were exposed to and it
had religious significance to chl was a god of cocow
growers and merchants. But until recently we didn't know of
any chocolate use that came much before five hundred BC,
which was dated from Mayan pottery found in northern Belize.
But there was a more recent discovery that changed our

(06:26):
thoughts on that. So yeah. In two thousand and seven,
some scientists started running tests on a cash of pottery
found in the Aluah Valley perhaps and they discovered that
this pottery had traces of theo Bra mine, which is
coco's chemical calling card, that is chocolate. You like that
alliteration there, it's the it's the thing that makes chocolate chocolate.

(06:49):
And this, the pottery that they found, was a lot
older than any of the stuff they had found before.
It dated anywhere from fourteen hundred BC to eleven d BC.
So suddenly we have definitive evidence of chocolate consumption way
way earlier than we had originally thought. So moving on
to the Aztec people and the famous introduction of chocolate

(07:11):
to the West. In fact, the Aztec word for the
frothy cocaw beverage, which I am not going to try
to pronounce, is where the word chocolate comes from, starts
with an ex. Y'all, we don't do great with it
with the words that start with an X, except for
xylophone maybe, um. But the Aztec didn't just drink chocolate,
they required it as a tribute. Cocao seeds were considered money,

(07:32):
which is maybe the first push towards cocao as a commodity.
And we found all sorts of trivia that we love.
But according to a sixteenth century az Tech document, one
cocow being equaled one to molly and one hundred beans
equaled one turkey. Hen which what are you going to
do with one cocal bean? I would take the to Molly.
I think they're going to put it in the display

(07:53):
of bizarre objects on their desk. But the Aztecs also
ascribed a lot of religious ceremonial properties to the beans,
so maybe that's why it would be good to have
even just one bean. They also had a chocolate god
named Kuetso Kato who brought cacao from paradise. And it's
interesting here we're going to sort of venture outside of

(08:15):
the Aztecs for a minute, but chocolate still has a
lot of religious significance today. I mean you probably eat
it around Christmas. Maybe you couldn't. We always get an
advent calendar and oh yes, to day you get your
little piece of chocolate. Um. Obviously, Easter a big chocolate
eating holiday in Hanaka and in Mexico, it's included in

(08:35):
Day of the Dead offerings and sometimes it's it's still
included in the form of actual cacao seeds, so not
just little tinfoil wrap chocolates, but the real deal. And consequently,
going back to our ads text, chocolate was an elite
beverage because you know, it has all these religious and
ceremonial properties, and also because it was used as tribute

(08:57):
um and it was especially reserved for the rulers, the priests,
the high soldiers, and the very wealthy. And that's why
when Hernando Cortez showed up in the early fifteen hundreds,
the Aztec king Montezuma, offered him a drink. He thought
Cortez was a visiting god, so a couple of big
mistakes there. But Cortes doesn't even like the drink, so

(09:19):
he's obviously not a god. And then he doesn't like
the chocolate drink. But I mean that's understandable. It is
pretty bitter and probably hard to take for European palates.
So the conquete stores start mixing up the beverage, though
they can tell that something's going on with it. The
Aztecs are very into cacao, so they start mixing it,

(09:41):
adding things like honey or sugar or vanilla, and they
start heating it, so we're getting a little bit closer
to what we think of is coco now. And they
also started whisking it with a tool they called a molinillo.
Instead of that pouring it back and forth up and
while Columbus had taken some cacao back to Spain after

(10:01):
his fourth voyage in fifteen o two. A popular legend
has Dominican friars presenting Mesoamericans at court. The people offered
chocolate as a gift, and things cut on from there,
but really only in the Spanish court and among high
church officials. And it's amazing, but the Spanish were able
to keep this secret for a really long time, so

(10:22):
they had this secret drink that only the Spanish court
knew about. It's almost a century of Spanish lockdown on chocolate.
But finally, obviously the word got out, and by the
sixteen hundreds a lot of Spanish princesses were going off
and marrying into other royal houses and taking their chocolate
with them, and you could find coco in courts across Europe.

(10:45):
In France, it was supposedly introduced by Anne of Austria,
who was the Spanish King's daughter. She married Louis and
I was thinking it's funny since she's supposedly responsible for
bringing chocolate to France. The imported French queen and always
bring like the best stuff with them lepons of Medici
and the fork. That's a pretty good one. Let this

(11:06):
be a lesson to you all. It became a royal
monopoly actually, and in the Spanish Church it became an
acceptable fasting beverage, which is so funny because now that's
something people often give up for lent. Yeah, exactly. Um.
And this is another sort of strange church related story.
But supposedly eighteenth century cardinals would drink it when they

(11:30):
elected a new pope, and it was so important and
so much a part of the high Church officials daily
lives that maybe it disguised the poison that killed Pope
Clement in seventeen seventy four. So it's a rumor there.
But what if chocolate killed you? Mysterious pope death? In

(11:50):
sixteen fifty seven, the first chocolate house opened in London,
and let's not think of that as this place people
just went around sipping cocoa like a romantic venue. You know.
It was a place for something. A lot of them
are just for men, just to socialize and gamble and
talk politics, which Sarah said, it's hard to imagine getting

(12:11):
very radical over coco. It's more of a comforting traditional
I would say, cover up with your cocoa and your
marshmallows on top and book or something. But even while
it's still an elite beverage, you know, it's not something
that a whole lot of people are drinking. In Europe,
the demand for cocao became pretty intense very quickly, and

(12:33):
so the Spanish and the English, Dutch and the French
all started plantations, not just in Mesoamerica anymore, but all
around the equator, anywhere that the cow tree would grow.
And it's a very intensive crop, like a lot of
New World crops where tobacco comes to mind. Um, it
was a lot of work to grow it. And so

(12:55):
the first people enslave to produce cocao where the native
meso America. But because a lot of them were so
quickly wiped out by these imported European diseases, plantation owners
turned to Africa and African slaves, and from the early
sixteen hundreds to the late eighteen hundreds most cacao was

(13:15):
grown under slave labor, and even after slavery was abolished,
the working conditions on these farms continued to be atrocious.
This isn't the right place in our timeline, but By
nineteen ten, chocolate maker William Cadbury asked several companies to
join him in boycotting companies that used unfair labor practices UM,

(13:35):
and that year the US band coco produced by slave labor.
But today most cacao was produced by independent farmers who
sell it as a global commodity through the coffee, sugar
and cocoa exchange. But that's the end stage of the
industrialization of chocolate. In the seventeen hundreds, we were just
at the beginning. So let's jump back a little. Part

(13:58):
of the reason why chocolate was so expensive and just
for the elite, is because it was an expensive import.
Cocao was expensive, sugar was expensive, but it was also
expensive to produce the stuff. To grind the beans, it's
a lot of work. And the beans would come from
the New World fermented and dried already, but they'd be

(14:18):
ground in Europe. So people spent the next few years
trying to figure out how to process these as quickly
and cheaply as possible. So we get wind driven chocolate
mills and horse driven chocolate mills, which I kind of
like the sound of that. UM. Even a Hylian man
holds man hold chocolate mills, maybe not um hydraulic machines

(14:40):
to grind up the seeds, and finally, with the invention
of the steam engine, we get a steam powered chocolate mill.
So at this point cocao could be ground in huge quantities,
really cheaply, really quickly, and it made it taste better too. Suddenly,
with all of this finely ground product, you could experiment

(15:02):
make some new products out of it, which is something,
of course important if it's going to be eaten as
a solid. And from there we've got a whole slew
of inventions that followed to make chocolate what we know
it today, something you mostly eat instead of something mostly drink.
In eighty eight C. J. Van Hounten of the Netherlands
patented chocolate powder. He pressed out cocoa butter from ground

(15:25):
and roasted beans and added alkaline salt to improve the
powders mix ability. And in eighteen forty seven the English
firm Fry and Sons combined cocoa butter with chocolate liquor
and sugar to produce eating chocolate, which that's what we
eat today. We just don't call it eating chocolate anymore.
And in eighteen seventy six Daniel Peter and Arina Sla

(15:47):
or should we just say nastle. I keep thinking of
the Friends episode with Phoebe and her grandmother and the
mysterious cookie recipe. Um. But anyways, those two add dried
melt to make milk chocolate, which probably pushes the whole
consumption of chocolate into a whole new realm. And another

(16:08):
big thing is obviously advertising getting people to think they
actually need chocolate, it's something that they need to buy
it and too well as a treat, but but a
treat that is definitely within reach. And turning chocolate not
into just a drink or just a candy that you
eat in bar form, but something you cook with you

(16:29):
make moose and cake and frosting and crucial baking ingredient.
Good job advertising. Finally, chocolate started to become a global
commodity in the late eighteen hundreds, and soldiers helped spread
the taste for it worldwide. Queen Victoria sent her soldiers
gifts of chocolate, were saying, she pops up in an
awful lot of our podcast where you least expect her um,

(16:52):
And in World War One, chocolate was part of rations. Yeah,
but the bigger chocolate companies played a very large role
in transforming chocolate into something that was not elite anymore,
but still a special treat, you know, like if you
were buying nice chocolates today, transforming it from something like
that into something that you can just buy on impulse,

(17:16):
the junkie mart and the lobby. Exactly, it's cheap, it's
late afternoon, and you need to pick me up. So
the biggest American manufacturer, Milton Hershey, had a lot to
do with that. He started his company in nine after
visiting the Chicago World's Fair, which we always get requests for, um.
He saw some chocolate making machinery and went home with

(17:39):
some of it in his own possession, and you go
to the Farreny buy machinery and started experimenting, trying to
figure out how the Swiss produced their famous chocolate and
eventually getting the formula down. But there's still one big
market that hasn't gone chocolate crazy yet, and that's China. Apparently,
the average Chinese person only eats three point five ounces

(18:02):
of it a year. Compare that to ten ms for
the average Swiss, which is twenty two pounds. It's a
lot of chocolate. So that is our history of chocolate.
But I'm sure there are some little tidbits that we
have missed. So if you have a little bit of
chocolate history you'd like to tell us, email us at
History podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also

(18:25):
on Twitter at missed in History, and we have a
Facebook fan page where we like to be able to
interact with all of you. And if you're looking for
a little more about the technical process of chocolate being
made with pictures, oh plus pictures, which is always good,
you can search for how Chocolate Works on our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com. For more

(18:47):
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com and be sure to check out the
stuff you missed in the History Glass blog on the
how stuff works dot com home page. Three