Though still served as a drink, Spanish chocolate was mixed with sugar and honey to sweeten the naturally bitter taste. Chocolate quickly became popular among the rich and wealthy.
Even Catholic monks loved chocolate and drank it to aid religious practices. The Spanish kept chocolate quiet for a very long time.
It was nearly a century before the treat reached neighboring France, and then the rest of Europe. To celebrate the union, she brought samples of chocolate to the royal courts of France. As the trend spread through Europe, many nations set up their own cacao plantations in countries along the equator. Chocolate remained immensely popular among European aristocracy. Royals and the upper classes consumed chocolate for its health benefits as well as its decadence.
Chocolate was still being produced by hand, which was a slow and laborious process. But with the Industrial Revolution around the corner, things were about to change. In , the invention of the chocolate press revolutionized chocolate making.
This innovative device could squeeze cocoa butter from roasted cacao beans, leaving a fine cocoa powder behind. The powder was then mixed with liquids and poured into a mold, where it solidified into an edible bar of chocolate. And just like that, the modern era of chocolate was born. Different forms and flavours of chocolate are produced by varying the quantities of the different ingredients.
Other flavours can be obtained by varying the time and temperature when roasting the beans. Milk chocolate is solid chocolate made with milk added in the form of powdered milk, liquid milk, or condensed milk. Such chocolate is labelled as "family milk chocolate" elsewhere in the European Union. The Hershey Company is the largest producer in the US. The actual Hershey process is a trade secret, but experts speculate that the milk is partially lipolyzed, producing butyric acid, and then the milk is pasteurized, stabilizing it for use.
This process gives the product a particular taste, to which the US public has developed an affinity, to the extent that some rival manufacturers now add butyric acid to their milk chocolates. Dark chocolate , also known as "plain chocolate", is produced using a higher percentage of cocoa with all fat content coming from cocoa butter instead of milk, but there are also "dark milk" chocolates and many degrees of hybrids.
Baking chocolate containing no added sugar may be labeled "unsweetened chocolate". Both the Mayans and Aztecs believed the cacao bean had magical, or even divine, properties, suitable for use in the most sacred rituals of birth, marriage and death. According to Chloe Doutre-Roussel's book The Chocolate Connoisseur , Aztec sacrifice victims who felt too melancholy to join in ritual dancing before their death were often given a gourd of chocolate tinged with the blood of previous victims to cheer them up.
Sweetened chocolate didn't appear until Europeans discovered the Americas and sampled the native cuisine. Legend has it that the Aztec king Montezuma welcomed the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes with a banquet that included drinking chocolate, having tragically mistaken him for a reincarnated deity instead of a conquering invader. Chocolate didn't suit the foreigners' tastebuds at first —one described it in his writings as "a bitter drink for pigs" — but once mixed with honey or cane sugar, it quickly became popular throughout Spain.
By the 17th century, chocolate was a fashionable drink throughout Europe, believed to have nutritious, medicinal and even aphrodisiac properties it's rumored that Casanova was especially fond of the stuff. But it remained largely a privilege of the rich until the invention of the steam engine made mass production possible in the late s. In , a Dutch chemist found a way to make powdered chocolate by removing about half the natural fat cacao butter from chocolate liquor, pulverizing what remained and treating the mixture with alkaline salts to cut the bitter taste.
His product became known as "Dutch cocoa," and it soon led to the creation of solid chocolate. The creation of the first modern chocolate bar is credited to Joseph Fry, who in discovered that he could make a moldable chocolate paste by adding melted cacao butter back into Dutch cocoa. By , a little company called Cadbury was marketing boxes of chocolate candies in England. Not long afterwards, it is replaced by the steam engine, making it even easier to produce large amounts of chocolate. This makes chocolate both more consistent and cheaper to produce.
The family — who, like several of the early chocolate dynasties, were Quakers — also boycotted cacao from parts of the world where working conditions resembled slavery. That same year, Rodolphe Lindt invents a machine that churns the paste squeezed from cacao seeds into a smooth blend, giving chocolate a new, mellow texture. Today, U. Army D-rations include three 4-ounce chocolate bars. Skip to main content. Search form Search.
Chocolate meets European culture In the 16th century , the Spanish, searching for gold in the New World, instead found cacao.
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