5 Things You Might Not Know About the History of Chocolate
The UK is a nation of chocoholics. We get through nearly 700,000 tonnes of the stuff each year, and at least half of us tucking in at least once per week.
But how much do you know about the history of chocolate? From its origins as a savoury hot drink to its promotion as a 17th-century superfood, here are five things that might surprise you about this much-loved tempting treat...
1. Ancient civilizations used cacao beans as currency
The people of South and Central America were chocolate addicts long before anyone in Europe had even tasted the stuff. Like tomatoes, potatoes and dozens of our other favourite foodstuffs, cocoa is native to Central and South America, and cocoa beans were used as money and even as offerings to gods. They drank cocoa, rather than eat it. The Mayans’ version was decidedly savoury, made of ground cacao beans, maize and water and flavoured with allspice and vanilla, while the Aztecs added chilli powder and achiote, giving the drink a scarlet hue. They sometimes boiled the drink to create an early – if very different – predecessor of what we’d call hot chocolate today.
2. Chocolate took a while to take off in Europe
Europeans weren’t convinced by cocoa at first – one described it as ‘a bitter drink for pigs’ – but all that changed when the Spanish added sugar and spices to make a much more palatable drink. By the early 17th century, cocoa was making its way across the Atlantic to be turned into a high-end hot chocolate treat for wealthy European elites.
The English took a little longer to get a taste for it, and high import duties meant that it was only available to the very rich. They mixed it with water or milk, sugar, egg yolks and sometimes brandy, and drank it out of small dishes rather than cups.
This Easter, we've joined forces with Love Cocoa to create the ultimate hot chocolate inspired by history. Watch our video here.
3. Chocolate was an Enlightenment-era superfood
In the 17th century many Europeans believed that the body contained four ‘humours’, or types of fluid. According to the theory, each humour had specific elemental qualities, which needed to be kept in balance for good health. Food had these qualities too, so attention had to be paid to getting the mixture right, which why the Spanish mixed chocolate (thought to be cold and dry) with spices like cinnamon, vanilla and sugar (thought to be hot and moist). One optimistic Spanish doctor wrote in 1631 that chocolate ‘preserves from all infectious diseases’.
Not everyone could agree on exactly which category it fell into. The unknown author of The Natural History of Chocolate (1724) thought spices interfered with chocolate’s benefits – but that those benefits included prolonging the lives of old men and acting as an aphrodisiac.
4. Chocolate houses were popular – and political
Chocolate was enjoyed at fashionable coffee shops and dedicated chocolate houses. They were frequented by late 17th and 18th-century literati and were renowned hubs for political factions – so much so that Charles II tried (and failed) to suppress them. The clubs were notorious gambling dens, and Daniel Defoe advised fathers to warn their daughters of ‘promiscuous conversations that take place in chocolate houses.’
During Queen Anne’s reign, The Cocoa Tree in Pall Mall was a favoured haunt of dissident Jacobites, but that didn’t stop Anne being a fan of the dark stuff. In May 1709 she spent £50 on drinking chocolate – equivalent to about £5,000 in today’s money.
5. Cocoa’s links to the slave trade
Cocoa’s rise in popularity coincided with a massive increase in the use of slave labour. At first, the Spanish used indigenous people to grow and harvest cocoa, but disease and maltreatment of the local people had a catastrophic impact on the native population, which had fallen by 90% by the end of the 17th century.
They were replaced by enslaved Africans, brought to the ‘New World’ as part of the Triangular Trade. Between the 16th and 19th centuries many millions of Africans were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic to work on plantations to grow cocoa as well as tobacco, cotton and sugar.
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