History of Chocolates

Chocolate : A Mesoamerican Luxury

Chocolate : The Aztecs 1200 - 1521

Chocolate : A Spanish Conquest 1521 - 1600

Chocolate : A European Sweet

Chocolate : Industrial Revolution

Chocolate : Today

Introduction

We chocolatiers at Prestat are as much fascinated by the history of chocolate as its taste!  So let us indulge you here in a fascinating and interesting story on the birth of chocolate, 3,000 years ago, to this wonderful food that everyone loves to eat.

 Surprisingly, it has only been in the last two hundred years that chocolate turned into the affordable hand-made chocolates that fill our shelves.   For nearly all of the 3,000 year history of chocolate, chocolate has been consumed as an expensive drink that had a very bitter taste, and was nothing links the hot-chocolate drink that we are used to now.  

 Chocolate was discovered over 2,000 years ago in the tropical rainforests of the Americas, in the rather ugly cacao tree, by the Maya people and their ancestors in Mesoamerica.  They took the mysterious tree from the rainforest and grew it in their own backyards, where they fermented, roasted, and ground the seeds into a paste.  Then it was mixed with water, chile peppers, cornmeal, and other ingredients and turned the paste into a frothy, spicy chocolate drink.

By 1400, the Aztec empire dominated a sizeable segment of Mesoamerica and the Mayan people, and they too became intoxicated by the unusual product of chocolate.  Aztec Priests presented cacao seeds as offerings to the gods and served chocolate drinks during sacred ceremonies.  The Aztecs traded with Maya for cacao and often required that citizens and conquered peoples pay their tribute in cacao seeds.  Cacao seeds became money!

Like the earlier Maya, the Aztecs also consumed their bitter chocolate drink seasoned with spices, but unlike Mayas chocolate didn’t grow in their back gardens, and so wasn’t accessible to all.   The high demand, the lack of supply, and it’s exquisite taste, led chocolate to take on its own symbolism of wealth and importance.

Later, the Spanish conquistadors of the Aztecs and Mesomarica in the early sixteenth century were also won over by the ‘new’ chocolate drink, and they brought the seeds back home to Spain, where new and tastier recipes were created, spreading the chocolate drink’s popularity throughout Europe. 

As chocolate was an expensive import, only those with money could afford to drink it, and it remained an elite beverage and a status symbol for Europe’s upper classes for the next 300 years.  But gradually by 1800s new technologies and innovations altered the production and taste of chocolate, and opened it up to a wider audience .

The steam engine made it possible to grind cacao and produce large amounts of chocolate cheaply and quickly, and later inventions like the cocoa press and the conching machine made it possible to create smooth, creamy, solid chocolate for eating—not just liquid chocolate for drinking.

Yet despite new processes and machinery improving the quality of chocolate and the speed at which it can be produced, cacao farming itself remains basically unaltered.  People grow cacao in equatorial climates all around the world today using traditional techniques first developed in Mesoamerica. Cacao is still harvested, fermented, dried, cleaned, and roasted mostly by hand.