Ancient chocolate Brief history

Humans have a long relationship with chocolate, dating back some 3000 years or more to the time of the Olmec civilization that lived in what is now south-central Mexico. In fact, it is believed that the word cacao derives from the Olmec people, who called it kakaw.

Following on from the Olmec, came the Mayans, who took cacao to the heart of their culture. They used cacao ceremonially and shamanistically, even having a baptism ritual for boys and girls that involved cacao. The Mayans were the first major civilization to use cacao beans as currency and had numerous gods associated with cacao.

When the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes landed in 1519 he found an Aztec civilization with cacao at the centre of their culture. The last Aztec Emperor, Montezuma was a renowned chocoholic, recorded by Spanish chroniclers to consume up to 50 cups of a cacao drink from gold vessels at feasts, before visiting his harem.

It is most likely that Cortes brought cacao to Europe and from there the world. The rest, as they say, is history.

Cacao, cocoa, modern-day chocolate

The cacao consumed in its native lands of the Americas was a bitter, spicy affair, often consumed as a drink. It was the Europeans that combined cacao with refined sugar, first as a drink and later as solid chocolate bars. Today, cacao is more widely known as cocoa, which started out as a British slang term for cacao.

In 1828, a Dutchman invented a process for removing a lot of the fat, the cacao butter, from the cacao. The residue could be ground into a powder and was then treated with alkaline salts to improve how it mixed with water. The process is known as “Dutching” and the end product is known as cocoa or cocoa powder. The first bars of milk chocolate was produced in 1879, by combining defatted and alkalized cocoa powder with milk powder recently invented by Henri Nestlé. These processes then led to mass production of cheap, low-quality chocolate.

Recent years have seen a renaissance in good quality chocolate, with increasing numbers of people no longer satisfied with cheap chocolate, packed full of refined sugars, additives and vegetable oils. There are now artisan producers of chocolate around the world, focusing on good quality cacao beans and ingredients, carefully made in smaller batches.