chili) were carefully added to create different tastes and textures.
The Mayans were also aggressive traders. As a result, chocolate had already spread north to the Aztec Empire of central Mexico by the time the Mayan civilization began to crumble in the ninth century. The frugal Aztecs used the cacao bean as currency, using beans to prepare chocolatl only when the commodity had become so worn that it could no longer be traded.
Once again, the consumption of chocolate was considered a luxury restricted to Aztec kings, noblemen, and the upper ranks of the priesthood, although chocolate was also given to warriors because of its energy-boosting properties.
According to American historian William Hickling, Emperor Montezuma of Mexico refused any beverage other than chocolatl, which he consumed in goblets before entering his harem, likely contributing to the belief that the drink was also an aphrodisiac. The Emperor is reported to have consumed up to 50 cups of chocolatl a day.
Christopher Columbus tasted the drink in 1502 but was largely unimpressed. Spanish explorer and conqueror Hernán Cortés was quick to recognize the value the Aztecs placed on cacao beans in 1519. He established cacao plantations around the Caribbean and returned to Spain in 1528 with a cargo of beans, an Aztec recipe, and the instruments for preparing the native drink.
Chocolatl predates the arrival of coffee and tea in Europe by more than eighty years. And it was in Spain that the drink would undergo its first major innovation. Early acceptance of the New World drink within the Spanish political and cultural elite was decidedly mixed. One individual described the bitter-tasting liquid as better fit for pigs than for people.
Nevertheless, enthusiasm for the beverage could not be contained, especially after the Spanish emperor sweetened the drink with cane sugar, vanilla, and even wine. For the next century, Spanish clergy would continue to refine the drink with nuts, powdered flowers, orange water, and recently discovered spices and sugar from the Orient.
Chocolate became a welcome addition to an otherwise bland diet of meat, bread, porridge, and a limited supply of vegetables. The Spanish were anxious to keep the exotic beverage a secret from the rest of Europe.
In 1580, the first chocolate-processing plant was established in Spain. By this time, chocolate was a status symbol to be enjoyed in excess by a privileged few. Initially, the drink was consumed in the original manner of the Mayans and the Aztecs. As the appetite for chocolate grew, the method of transferring the liquid from vessel to lip was refined. It was served thick, cold, and frothy in cups, and would later be poured hot from steaming gold vermeil carafes or chocolate pots.
Fashionable Chocolateríes became features in Spanish cities and towns. The wealthy would gather in the afternoon for a cup of chocolate and a piece of picatoste, or fried bread, to dip in it. Less fashionable was the rumour that Charles the Second of Spain sat sipping chocolate while observing victims of the inquisition being put to death.
The Spanish considered the properties of chocolate to be less spiritual and more medicinal. It was common for medical entrepreneurs to study the exotic substances brought back by explorers as a cure for various ailments. Chocolate was no exception, and it was said to be useful for covering up poisons.
By the late 1600s, the grand ladies of the land had become so fond of this frothy beverage that they were accustomed to having it served to them frequently, even in church. As justification for their enjoyment, they referred to its medicinal use, and claimed it prevented fainting and “weakness” during the long ceremonies.
One bishop considered it a blatant abuse, and he forbade the practice. Drinking chocolate in church obviously broke the fast laws. (Not to mention that so much pleasure must be pagan!) The ladies, in retaliation, simply took themselves and their entourage to another church. A rumour holds that the offending clergyman later died of a cup of poisoned chocolate. The whole affair became a fearful scandal.
Eventually, in 1662, Pope Alexander VII put a final solution to the affair when he declared “Liquidum non frangit jejunum.” [Liquids (including chocolate) do not break the fast.] It is likely that this decision was based on the fact that chocolate, like so many other herbs, was considered to have medicinal qualities.
The pleasure of chocolate could not be contained. Word of this extraordinary beverage spread throughout Europe. Antonio Carletti, a Florentine merchant, wrote about the growing and processing of cacao into a drink during a visit to Guatemala.
The Spanish custom of chocolate drinking was introduced to the French court in 1615, during the marriage of Anne of Austria with Louis XIII of France. A gift of chocolate was part of the Spanish Infanta’s dowry.
The French also seized on the medicinal properties of chocolate. Francois Joseph Broussais, a French physician born in 1772, said, “Chocolate of good quality, well made, properly cooked, is one of the best cures that I have yet found for my patients and for myself.”
By the 1650s, approximately 130 years after chocolatl had been introduced to Spain, chocolate had made its way across the English Channel to London. It might have arrived much sooner, but Elizabethan privateers, patrolling the seas of the late sixteenth century for Spanish ships to plunder, appeared even less impressed by the cacao bean than Columbus.
In 1579, the English buccaneers are said to have mistaken a shipload of cacao beans for sheep droppings and to have burned the vessel and its precious cargo. On another occasion, the English destroyed more than 100,000 loads of cacao, or 240 million beans, in the Mexican port of Guatulco.2
England’s first chocolate house was opened in London in 1657 by a Frenchman. The June 6, 1657 issue of the Public Advertiser announced, “In Bishopsgate Street, in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West India drink, called Chocolat, to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time; and also unmade, at reasonable prices.”
The paper proclaimed chocolate’s medicinal qualities, writing that the drink “cures and preserves the body of many diseases.”
Reasonable prices, however, were open to interpretation. For despite its widespread acceptance into European society, chocolate’s democratization remained many years away. In England, unlike France and other European countries, chocolate was available to whoever could afford the price. But in 1660 the British Parliament raised money for King Charles II by imposing a seventy-five pence per pound tax on the import of raw cacao beans, thus keeping the processed product out of the reach of the ordinary Briton. If someone was caught smuggling cacao beans, the penalty was one year in prison.
British duties on cacao and gallons of drinking chocolate also served to moderate consumption, which suited the King, who considered chocolate houses hotbeds of sedition. Excessive taxation, however, did not spoil Britain’s appetite for chocolate. In 1874, an avant-garde London coffeehouse called At the Coffee Mill and Tobacco Roll began serving chocolate in cakes and rolls in the Spanish tradition.
Despite its popularity, the chocolate drink that consumed Europe in the eighteenth century bears precious little resemblance to the drinking chocolate we enjoy today. The problem was with the cacao bean itself.
To produce a drink, the bean has to be ground into what is commonly known as chocolate liquor. The crude processes to create early European drinking chocolate involved roasting the cacao bean and grinding it into chocolate liquor. The liquor contained 53 percent fat or cacao butter. Once turned into a beverage, the butter would naturally rise to the top in greasy blobs, making the drink unappetizing and sometimes difficult to digest.
The Aztecs crudely tried to solve the problem by adding ground maize to absorb the fat. Europeans either boiled the liquid, skimming the butter
