The earliest record of chocolate was over fifteen hundred years ago in the Central American rain forests, where the tropical mix of high rain fall combined with high year round temperatures and humidity provide the ideal climate for cultivation of the plant from which chocolate is derived, the Cacao Tree.

Xocolatl! or Chocolat or Chocolate as it became known, was brought to Europe by Cortez, by this time the conquistadors had learned to make the drink more palatable to European tastes by mixing the ground roasted beans with sugar and vanilla (a practice still continued today), thus offsetting the spicy bitterness of the brew the Aztec’s drank.

The first chocolate factories opened in Spain, where the dried fermented beans brought back from the new world by the Spanish treasure fleets were roasted and ground, and by the early 17th century chocolate powder – from which the European version of the drink was made – was being exported to other parts of Europe. The Spanish kept the source of the drink – the beans – a secret for many years, so successfully in fact, that when English buccaneers boarded what they thought was a Spanish ‘Treasure Galleon’ in 1579, only to find it loaded with what appeared to be ‘dried sheep’s droppings’, they burned the whole ship in frustration. If only they had known, chocolate was so expensive at that time, that it was worth it’s weight in Silver (if not Gold), Chocolate was Treasure Indeed! Within a few years, the Cocoa beverage made from the powder produced in Spain had become popular throughout Europe, in the Spanish Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany and – in about 1520 – it arrived in England.

Chocolate as we know
The first mention of chocolate being eaten in solid form is when bakers in England began adding cocoa powder to cakes in the mid 1600′s. Then in 1828 a Dutch chemist, Johannes Van Houten, invented a method of extracting the bitter tasting fat or “cocoa butter” from the roasted ground beans, his aim was to make the drink smoother and more palatable, however he unknowingly paved the way for solid chocolate as we know it. Chocolate as we know it today first appeared in 1847 when Fry & Sons of Bristol, England – mixed Sugar with Cocoa Powder and Cocoa Butter (made by the Van Houten process) to produce the first solid chocolate bar then, in 1875 a Swiss manufacturer, Daniel Peters, found a way to combine (some would say improve, some would say ruin) cocoa powder and cocoa butter with sugar and dried milk powder to produce the first milk chocolate.

Do not lick your screen!!