Chocolate Read online

  The breakfast was such as the best breakfasts then were: some variety of bread, hot rolls, buttered toast, tongue or ham and eggs. The addition of chocolate at one end of the table, and the wedding cake in the middle, marked the specialty of the day.5

  And after that, the bride and groom set off for their new home. Chocolate and wedding cake, neither of which were to be consumed without proper reason, were enough to mark the occasion without vulgarity.

  At the same time as art and literature in northern Europe presented chocolate as an integral part of aristocratic life, associated at least as fully with its vices as with its virtues, there were two developments towards the democratization of chocolate which would characterize its nineteenth century history. Chocolate production began to be mechanized and chocolate re-crossed the Atlantic, beginning to be consumed and then produced in North America.

  Francois Boucher, The Breakfast, 1739.

  Most of the cocoa consumed in Europe was ground by hand, possibly until as late as the nineteenth century, although a watermill had been used for cocoa in 1729. In cities across Europe, chocolate grinders carried their metates, not significantly different from those used by the Maya, from one house to another, kneeling to grind the roasted beans with stone rollers. It was work particularly associated with Sephardic Jews, who suffered waves of persecution at the hands of the trade guilds that policed food production in Europe until the late eighteenth century. In 1761 Joseph Fry of Bristol expanded his chocolate sales following the purchase of a watermill, and three years later had a London warehouse and ‘a network of agents in fifty-three towns’. By the late 1770s there were water-powered chocolate workshops in several French towns, and at the end of the century eight German and Austrian cities claimed chocolate factories. Dutch producers, naturally, used windmills, while there was a mule-driven mill in Spain; the idea of using inanimate power to grind large quantities of grain or beans had long been familiar, and as soon as steam power was available, it was applied to cocoa beans as well as wheat.

  It is in the context of these processes that it becomes possible to trace chocolate consumption in North America. Relatively little is known about cocoa in colonial North America, but it seems to have reached the colony mostly via import from Britain (although this seems highly unlikely given the obvious probability of overland trade with Central American producers). Cocoa shipments were very heavily taxed, which makes it probable that rather more chocolate entered the colony than was officially recorded. Despite high prices, coffee houses in Boston in the late seventeenth century served chocolate, and there are records of artisans and labourers possessing cocoa beans. Account books from mid-eighteenth-century shops show individual merchants ordering small supplies of cocoa from England, along with sugar, tea and coffee. There were metates in colonial America, but most consumers bought chocolate in blocks which, by the end of the eighteenth century, were manufactured in the East Coast cities. As in Britain, chocolate was supplied to soldiers as a portable and dense source of energy, and it was consumed by fighters on both sides during the American Revolution.

  Early factory methods.

  The first documented chocolate mill in North America began to turn in 1765, when John Hannan, an Irish emigrant chocolate maker, began to work on the Neponset River in Dorchester, Massachusetts (although given the presence of mills in most American towns in this era, it seems likely that some of them occasionally ground cocoa as well as grain). In 1779 John Hannan disappeared, having said that he was investigating cocoa suppliers in the West Indies, and the following year James Baker took over the business. Under his son, Edmund, trade expanded rapidly when imports from Europe collapsed during the ‘War of 1812’, and in 1824 James Baker’s grandson Walter took charge. Now owned by the Kraft corporation, Baker’s chocolate is still widely available in North America.

  Despite the rise and rise of American chocolate cookery upon which Baker’s continues to depend, chocolate in America seems to have remained almost exclusively the basis of an expensive drink until the nineteenth century. Early American cookbooks make no use of chocolate as an ingredient, and there seems to be no parallel to the idea of chocolate as an aristocratic women’s luxury which kept European chocolate in its place until the technological advances of the nineteenth century replaced the spicy, bitter beverage with a sweet milky substance bearing minimal resemblance to the chocolates of Mesoamerica.

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  The Chocolate Factory

  Chocolate became increasingly mobile in the eighteenth century, but continued to flow into Europe from one source: Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America. In the nineteenth century, this dynamic changed. Chocolate began to be grown, manufactured and produced in new locations, places to which Theobroma cacao was neither botanically nor culturally native. As the empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took shape, chocolate began to flow in new channels and took on new meanings. Like much of our modern material culture, it also underwent a profound transformation during the nineteenth century. It entered the 1800s as a fatty drink and ended them as (among many other things) the mass-produced milky drink and solid bar familiar to consumers today. The firms that first mobilized the innovations in production, commodification and marketing that underpinned this transformation are mostly still the major players in the industry today. Chocolate began as product associated (in Europe) with Catholic clergy and idle, languid aristocracy, and ended its transformation being sold as a dietary staple and nutritious boon to the working poor. In the process it became associated with places from African jungles to alpine meadows, and identified with everything from maternal love to purple cows.

  The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm describes the last two centuries as consisting of a ‘long’ nineteenth century, stretching from the French Revolution in 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and a ‘short’ twentieth century, which lasted from the First World War and the Russian Revolution until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. If we measure historical time (as people sometimes measure their days) by chocolate, the dates are somewhat different, but similar periods could be said to apply. The chocolate nineteenth century began not so much with the storming of the Bastille as with the related wars of independence in South America, which interrupted a number of the supply chains of cacao, and set in motion a transformation of production. The end of the chocolate century came not so much with the First World War, which put barely a dent in expansion and production, but with the profound disruption of most global commerce, and particularly decolonization, in the wake of the Second World War. And if we consider the end of forced labour in the chocolate industry as one of the markers of the nineteenth century, in some places it has yet to end.

  Revolutions, and the Lack Thereof

  Revolutionary stirrings in the late eighteenth century had an impact on both sides of the chocolate chain. Throughout the Caribbean, Napoleon’s conquest of Spain and Portugal in 1806 sparked already militant opposition to Spanish authority into open rebellion, which reached a peak in the Venezuelan revolution in 1811, and spread throughout the northern part of the continent. Many of these revolts were led by the Creole elite there, who owned most of the cacao plantations. They wanted both freedom from Spain and to strengthen their hold over the territories to avoid slave rebellions such as the one that had happened in Haiti a few years earlier. Ironically, Venezuela did indeed gain independence, but in the process many of the planters lost their slaves (who in many cases were recruited into the loyalist armies) and/or their plantations. Due to this unrest and lack of cheap labour, production of cacao in South America declined sharply, and only recovered much later in the century, when newly independent nations such as Ecuador came once more into their own as chocolate suppliers.

  Along with production in Central and South America (where consumption among all classes remained common), consumption of chocolate in Europe also declined sharply during the Napoleonic wars. The various naval blockades of the continent limited the import of chocola
te to most parts of Europe, after the initial destruction of the Spanish fleet that had once brought most of the cacao across the Atlantic. After the end of the war in Europe, chocolate supplies remained low because reduced incomes meant reduced demand and because continued unrest in South American affected production. Chocolate remained an expensive luxury for several decades.

  In many places, expensive chocolate was replaced by other drinks. Unlike cacao, coffee and tea could still find their way into Europe via the ‘back door’ of Asia in spite of blockades, and they were generally cheaper to come by. A very wide array of local products were produced to replace the popular but now scarce hot drinks. Salep, a drink made from roasted orchid roots, once popular throughout the Ottoman empire, began to be produced locally and enjoyed renewed popularity in Britain as chocolate and other hot drinks became unavailable or prohibitively expensive in the first decades of the century. Like chocolate, and unlike coffee or tea, salep was thick and considered very nutritious. The root of the chicory plant was similarly roasted and brewed as a drink. Many of these drinks were common for many years after their colonial counterparts became available once more, usually among the poorer classes. Chicory, for example, grew popular in Germany during the continental blockades and only went fully out of mainstream taste there at the end of scarcity several wars later, when ‘real bean coffee’ came into the financial reach of all socio-economic groups in the early 1950s. It remains a tradition in many places, including India and, perhaps more famously, New Orleans.

  A cacao press of the kind pioneered by Van Houten in 1828.

  The decline of chocolate production and consumption in the early nineteenth century was the first and perhaps only interruption in a steady expansion from the sixteenth century to the present day. It was during this decline that the manufacturing development which allowed chocolate to take on its familiar, modern form occurred. Chocolate had such a high fat content that the excess cocoa butter had to be skimmed off the finished drink or absorbed in starchy additions such as arrowroot, potato starch or sago flour. In 1828 the Dutch Coenraad van Houten developed a process for using a hydraulic press to extract cocoa butter from chocolate liquor. Using this press, he was able to reduce the cocoa butter content of the liquor from 53 per cent to around 27 per cent, leaving a cake that could easily be powdered and sold for drinking. In addition, van Houten then took the additional step of adding alkaline salts (the process now known as ‘Dutching’, as it became standard practice first in Dutch cocoa manufacture), which improved the way the chocolate mixes with water, in addition to making its flavour milder and its colour darker.

  Nearly every history of chocolate, not least the potted histories now put forward by chocolate manufacturers themselves, lists this 1828 event as a major turning point in chocolate history, and gives the impression that a revolution in form and mass production of chocolate took off soon after. This has more to do with our habits of telling history as a story of heroic inventors and technological transformations, however, than it does with the ways and forms of chocolate in the nineteenth century. Van Houten’s press did not come out of the blue: there had been experiments with cocoa butter presses since the late seventeenth century. What is more, while van Houten’s press eventually did play an important role in chocolate manufacture, its immediate impact, both on van Houten’s fortunes particularly and chocolate production generally, was negligible. For many years to come, even people in van Houten’s native Netherlands still prepared the drink from pressed bars of unsweetened, fully fatted chocolate and boiling water. In fact, more ‘traditional’ ways of preparing and consuming chocolate persisted in a number of places alongside the increasing number of new and now more familiar forms of chocolate that emerged over the course of the century.

  Instead of looking at van Houten’s invention as a revolutionary event, looking at it in context provides a neat illustration of the actual state of chocolate production and consumption in Europe at the time. The main reason this supposed ‘revolution’ was mostly ignored at first is that there was very little use for the excess cocoa butter. At that point the only useful by-product of chocolate production was the shells. These were ground and used roasted as a cheap tea-like drink, which was consumed by lower classes in the Low Countries and Ireland (where it was known as ‘miserables’). The shells were also used for animal fodder or used illicitly as a filling agent in pressed chocolate to stretch the more expensive product. Extracting the cocoa butter was thus primarily a more efficient means of making the drink less fatty, but it did not generate any useful by-products.

  Van Houten’s development was one part of a wave of mechanization and industrialization of chocolate production, in which not the Dutch but the French were at the forefront. Already in the early part of the century, a number of individual chocolate manufacturers in France were mechanizing chocolate production, adding machines to the processes of grinding. This was one area where van Houten’s press did have more immediate impact, but not in the way or place that one might expect. J. M. Lehmann of Dresden, who had helped van Houten develop his hydraulic press, went into business in 1834 specializing in cocoa processing machinery and soon became one of the leading manufacturers throughout Europe. British manufacturers Cadbury Brothers of Birmingham and J. S. Fry & Sons bought presses in 1860 and 1866 respectively. Furthermore, it was Lehmann’s machines that the American candy-maker Milton Snavely Hershey saw on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Once the exhibition closed, Hershey bought the machines and they became the cornerstone of his new chocolate business.

  Finally, although van Houten’s press was not an immediate success, the fact that he was investing in chocolate production at a time when chocolate supposedly ‘suffered from an unfashionable image’ is also worthy of note. Clearly there was enduring demand for chocolate, ancien régime or insecurity of supply notwithstanding. The renowned French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825 that chocolate ‘had become completely ordinary’ in France, particularly after the blockades ended and ‘rid us of all those humbugs one was forced to taste, but which were no more chocolate than chicory is mocha.’ Indeed, Brillat-Savarin had nothing but praise for the substance, emphasizing particularly its healthy qualities:

  It remained for time and experience, those two great masters, to show that chocolate prepared with care is as healthy as it is agreeable. That it is nourishing, easily digested, and is not so injurious to beauty as coffee is said to be. It is very suitable for those persons who are given to great mental toil, to professors and lawyers, especially to travellers. It also suits certain feeble stomachs, and has been thought most advantageous in chronic diseases. It is the last resource in ailments of the pylorus.

  Brillat-Savarin’s descriptions of chocolate illustrate the new social structure in which chocolate was circulating. While he emphasizes the overall nutritious nature of chocolate, he also makes abundantly clear that its benefits are really only available to those who possess the skills to prepare it properly, and the bodily discipline to know when and how to take it. The renewed emphasis on the health benefits of chocolate seems to fit in well at a time when a taste for it was certainly widespread, but there was general uncertainty about the correct forms of preparation and consumption. This also highlights the ambiguous position between confection and medicine that chocolate would still occupy through much of the century.

  For the first half of the century, then, the meanings and physical form of chocolate were shifting. In a number of local settings, confectioners and pastry-makers – in addition to pharmacists – were creating novelties they could sell, and chocolate was one of the ingredients that seemed to show promise. The innovations that slowly transformed chocolate took place not in the Netherlands, but first in Britain, then in Switzerland, much later in the century. In Britain, the firm of J. S. Fry & Sons pioneered the creation of a solid chocolate by pressing out and then reintroducing some of the cocoa butter. The result was more moist than the solid pastil
les which had been sold until then, but remained somewhat gritty and was not very popular. Swiss manufacturers were also experimenting with ways to produce solid chocolate confections more cheaply and palatably to meet the expanding demand. Small merchants, whose names are well-known firms or brands now such as François-Louis Cailler (whose name now graces Nestlé’s quality range) and Philippe Suchard (another enduring industry name), began to perfect mechanical processes for grinding and mixing superior chocolate. The great Swiss breakthroughs came in 1879. One of them was the invention of milk chocolate in the form we know it now. Cailler’s son-in-law and heir in the chocolate business, Daniel Peter, devised a system for combining the powdered milk recently invented by his countryman Henri Nestlé with chocolate (Nestlé bought the Cailler, Peter, Kohler firm in 1929). The result, which also utilized cocoa butter, formed an easily moulded solid. Independently, Rodolphe Lindt came up with a mechanical process known as ‘conching’, in which granite rollers manipulate the chocolate liquor, mixing and heating it gently, resulting in a smooth mass and better flavour. This resulted in the sort of chocolate with which we are now familiar – a smooth-grained solid substance for eating – and made Lindt’s fortunes; to this day, Lindt & Sprüngli are an independent and well-known firm. Many other firms soon picked up the technique – that is, purchased the machine – and slowly the new form diffused. Both of these forms also came up with a use for cocoa butter, which is reintroduced once it is pressed out. It was this use, and later on its many other commercial uses, that made van Houten’s inventions transformative. As one part of a battery of machines, the cacao press took its place in the steadily diffusing and rapidly standardizing process of chocolate manufacture.