Answers to Go with Susan Smith
Q. Recently, we had a question about a film that sometimes forms while heating milk for hot chocolate. Some of the books we looked in also offered historical information on hot chocolate. We wondered who first drank hot chocolate?
A. As you may have noticed, my customers and I are prone to find more things to be curious about while researching their question. Here is Part 2, Hot Chocolate: A history
As is often the case, our nonfiction for kids and teens offers the most interesting, succinct material on a subject. The following information comes from “Chocolate: Riches from the Rainforest” by Robert Burleigh.
The ancient peoples of Central America and Mexico all valued the fruit of the cacao tree. The Olmec were the first to open the pods, probably for the sweet-tasting pulp rather than the seeds.
The Maya, known for their huge temples, hieroglyphics and calendars, left traces of their passion for chocolate when they buried drinking cups depicting cacao trees in the tombs of the rich.
The Aztecs rose to power around 1200 A.D. They traded for cacao seeds and demanded seeds as payment from the people they conquered. In time, cacao seeds became a kind of money.
The Aztecs drank their chocolate hot and consumed a lot of it. In the palace of Montezuma II, the last Aztec emperor, 2,000 pots of chocolate were drunk each day.
Cortes, who with his conquistadors conquered the Aztecs in the early 1500s, described chocolate as “the divine drink which fights fatigue.” When Cortez and his men returned to Spain, sugar was added to hot (and cold) chocolate drinks which became very popular.
Sugar cane wasn’t native to the Americas. Plantations were established on Caribbean islands with slave labor. Chocolate and sugar were expensive so in Europe, as in Mexico, chocolate was a drink for the upper classes.
Doctors prescribed the drink as a cure for depression. Chocolate houses were meeting places for drinking chocolate or coffee and discussing the news of the day.
The price of chocolate fell when Coenraad Van Houten, a Dutch inventor, built a press that could separate the shelled, crushed cacao seeds (known as chocolate liquor) into their two distinct parts: a fatty part and a purer chocolate part.
Now chocolate makers could mold candy bars by mixing the chocolate liquor with smaller portions of cocoa butter and sugar. The first edible solid chocolate candy appeared in England in 1874.
Then a Swiss chocolate maker, Daniel Peter, discovered a way to make a lighter kind of chocolate by adding evaporated milk to the mix of chocolate liquor, cocoa butter and sugar. The result was called milk chocolate, which is the sweet chocolate found in many candy bars today.
Finally, in the 1890s, an American candy maker, Milton Hershey, began to bring chocolate to the public in a large-scale way. He was known as “the Henry Ford of chocolate.”
