a modest amount of sugar. (Cacao is often referred to as ‘cocoa’, but this leads to confusion between the bean and the chocolaty drink of the same name. I shall therefore stick to ‘cacao’ when referring to the plant and its products.) The cacao bean grows on a species of tree called Theobroma cacao; the first word literally meaning ‘the food of the gods’, from the Greek theo for god and broma for food.
Why do we love chocolate so much? Its immediate appeal obviously hinges on the combination of rich flavours and sensual texture. Real chocolate melts at around body temperature, unleashing the complex flavours and aromas of several hundred chemical components of cacao. The flavours released by good chocolate can take several minutes to unfurl and develop fully. Chewing it curtails this process, rather like gulping good wine without pausing to savour it. The way to realise the full pleasure-giving potential of quality chocolate is to let it dissolve slowly in your mouth. Aficionados exhale through the nose, to maximise their appreciation of the bouquet, but you might find this makes you giggle. The simple advice is: suck, don’t chew.
We can enjoy the smooth texture and mellow flavour of chocolate to their best effect thanks to a Swiss chocolatier named Rodolphe Lindt who, in the late nineteenth century, developed the production technique known as conching – so called because the machine resembled in shape a giant conch shell. Conching entails rolling and smearing the molten chocolate while subjecting it to a stream of warm air. This blends the ingredients and releases unwanted volatile components. Serious chocolate undergoes several days of conching before it is ready. Before the invention of conching, chocolate was grainy and bitter.
Chocolate injects a dose of well-being into almost any occasion. Even pregnancy can benefit. Researchers at the University of Helsinki found that pregnant women who ate chocolate every day felt more positive and less stressed, both during pregnancy and six months after giving birth. The chocolate-eating mothers also made more positive assessments of their six-month-old offspring, probably because they felt more relaxed themselves.
In the comforting world of fiction, chocolate has even more wondrous properties. As any devotee of Harry Potter will know, chocolate is the best remedy for a young wizard who has just had a close encounter with a life-sapping Dementor of Azkaban. However, its sensual connotations can also provoke fictional disapproval. In Joanne Harris’s novel Chocolat, trouble erupts in a small French town after a chocolaterie opens. The town’s priest, who prefers ‘the harsh, clean world of the Old Testament’, fears the corrupting influence it will have on the pious residents. Chocolate epitomises physical pleasure and, as far as the priest is concerned, physical pleasure is ‘the crack into which the devil sends his roots’.
Eating pleasant-tasting food of any sort can lift mood, and chocolate is one of the best at doing this. Chocolate’s lasting associations with the better bits of childhood probably reinforce these pleasures. But at least some small fraction of its visceral appeal lies in its psychoactive constituents. Chocolate contains a number of substances with mild psychoactive properties. Foremost among these are the stimulants caffeine and its close chemical relative theobromine. A cup of cocoa may contain up to 25 milligrams of caffeine, about a third as much as a cup of instant coffee. Properly conducted laboratory experiments, of the double-blind, placebo-controlled variety, have demonstrated that the quantities of caffeine and theobromine contained in 50 grams of dark chocolate are sufficient to produce measurable improvements in people’s reaction times, their ability to process visual information and their subjective feeling of energy. White ‘chocolate’, which contains little or no cacao solids, has no such effect. Another substance found in chocolate is the element magnesium. According to one speculative hypothesis, chocolate might make some individuals feel better in the long run by correcting a magnesium deficiency in their diet.
Chocolate contains tiny amounts of a psychoactive substance called anandamide, which also happens to be one of the neurotransmitters used within the brain for signalling between nerve cells. Anandamide activates the same type of receptors in the brain that respond to cannabis. This might account for the widespread belief among cannabis-users that chocolate enhances the effects of their drug – although it has to be said that the amounts of anandamide in chocolate are so small as to make this doubtful. The fact that chocolate contains cannabis-like chemicals has even been used as a legal defence. In one case, a man who had been accused of smoking cannabis claimed that the test results were misleading because he had recently eaten a lot of chocolate. Laboratory tests cast doubt on the credibility of this defence and he was convicted.
Despite being a pleasurable pick-me-up, chocolate is not the reliable antidepressant that some devotees claim it to be. Eating chocolate engenders different emotional responses, ranging from unalloyed pleasure to extreme guilt. After reviewing the evidence, one group of academics concluded that chocolate is not very effective at alleviating low mood or depression, beyond the short-lived fix of pleasure. In fact, individuals who eat chocolate with the specific aim of lifting their mood may end up worse off, prolonging their gloom. This could also have something to do with the fact that people who eat chocolate for emotional comfort (along with most of the population of the UK) usually turn to milk chocolate, which contains smaller concentrations of the key ingredients.
The origins of the word ‘chocolate’ are, if anything, more controversial than the origins of the substance itself. However, there is general agreement that both hail from tropical America. One theory has it that ‘chocolate’ derives from the Nahuatl word xocolatl (or chocolatl), meaning, well, chocolate. Another theory is that ‘chocolate’ derives from cacahuatl, meaning ‘cacao water’, but that the Spanish swapped the ‘caca’ for ‘choco’ because of the unfortunate similarity with the Spanish slang caca, meaning shit. ‘Shit water’ was not a great name for a new product which in those days came in the form of a lumpy, viscous, dark-brown liquid.1
For most of its long history chocolate has been drunk, not eaten. Chocolate was invented more than three thousand years ago by the Olmec people in what is now Mexico. It was they who first domesticated the cacao tree and they who came up with the inspired idea of transforming its beans into a nutritious, if rather bitter, drink. Archaeological evidence shows that the inhabitants of present-day Honduras were drinking a chocolate beverage around 1150 BC. The drink was made from fermented cacao pulp, which suggests that this early prototype of chocolate might have been a spin-off from attempts to make alcohol. The Olmec were predecessors of the Maya, and it was the Maya who really developed the use of chocolate. Hundreds of years later, the Maya were using chocolate in most of their meals, both as a drink and as an ingredient in their cooking. The drink was flavoured with ingredients such as chilli, honey or vanilla and was often consumed hot. The Aztecs may not have invented chocolate, but they did give it great prominence in their culture, using it in religious ceremonies. They even used cacao beans as a form of currency – a rare example of money that really did grow on trees.
Chocolate did not reach Europe until the sixteenth century. It arrived, in tiny amounts and to minimal acclaim, with returning Spanish conquistadors. To begin with, no one paid much attention to this unappealing substance, although there was great interest in the travellers’ tales of how the Aztecs worshipped it. Hernando Cortés, the first of the conquistadors, had sent back thrilling reports of chocolate being served in golden goblets in the court of the emperor Motecuhzoma (‘Montezuma’) and of how this ‘divine’ drink enabled a man to walk all day without food. Despite their initial distaste for this strange and bitter beverage, the Spanish invaders quickly realised its commercial potential. The first European consumers of chocolate were Spanish monks and nuns who had picked up the habit in New Spain, as Mexico was then known. By the late sixteenth century, the Spanish were importing cacao from New Spain in significant quantities.
The early days of chocolate provide yet another illustration of how religious and secular authorities instinctively
