Chocolate - mmm...

Reading food magazines and writing about food quite often makes me hungry and that was definitely the case writing about the origins of chocolate for this month's Open House magazine. In the interests of sharing the love, here is what I discovered.

The Origins of Chocolate

Is there any one ingredient as universally loved as chocolate? Rich, indulgent and immensely satisfying, chocolate arouses the senses and tempts the tastebuds of even the most kilojoule-conscious diner. Yet chocolate wasn’t always the sweet, seductive treat we now know it as.

Chocolate dates back to between 250-900 AD, when the Mayan people of Central America are known to have unlocked the secret of the cacao bean, harvesting, fermenting, roasting and grinding the seeds into a paste which they mixed with water and other ingredients such as chilli and maize to form a bitter, frothy drink.

By 1400 cacao beans had become a form of currency in Central America, with the by-now dominant Aztec empire demanding their conquered foe pay them tributes in beans. As well as monetary value, cacao and chocolate played an important role in religious and royal ceremonies of the period. The Aztec ruler Motecuhzoma (Montezuma) is said to have drunk 50 flagons of chocolate a day. In addition to chilli, other flavourings such as vanilla, coriander, sage and honey were used by the Aztecs to flavour the drink, which was drunk cold.

The word chocolate itself is believed to come from the Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) word “xocolatl” or "chocolatl”, meaning bitter water.

It wasn’t until after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, when the Spanish began to ship cacao beans to Spain, that Europeans had their first taste of chocolate. With sugar added to the drink to make it more palatable, chocolate quickly proved a hit amongst wealthy Spaniards who could afford the pricey imported ingredients. By the 17th century the drink was popular with the ruling classes across Europe and increased demand led the French, English and Dutch to begin cultivating cacao in their colonies, often using slave labour to run their plantations.

As cacao became more plentiful and cheaper, people began experimenting with other ways of using it, including it in sorbets, pastries and cakes, but it wasn’t until the 1800s that advances in technology allowed chocolate to be made into bars. In 1828 Dutch chemist Conrad Van Houten came up with a way to press the fat - cocoa butter - from roasted ground beans, creating powdered cocoa. Treated with alkaline salts, this new form of chocolate not only blended more easily with water but could be remixed with cocoa butter to form a solid, leading to the first rudimentary chocolate bar appearing in England in 1847.

Later inventions by the Swiss allowed chocolate paste to be refined and kneaded into the smooth, creamy product we enjoy today. In 1879 Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter had the idea of using powdered milk to make milk chocolate, the most popular type of eating chocolate.

These days chocolate is available in a wide range of unsweetened, semisweet, bittersweet and milk varieties for both eating and cooking, and is produced around the world. Around two thirds of the world’s cacao beans are currently produced in Western Africa, with close to half coming from the Ivory Coast. Prices for the beans are extremely volatile and many farmers struggle to make a living wage. To try and combat this inequity, many chocolate manufacturers have embraced the ideals of the Fairtrade movement, which seeks to guarantee cocoa farmers higher and more consistent prices for their crops.

Now where did I put that block of Black & Green's Organic Chocolate?