One night, when the Aztec ruler was held captive in his own palace, about 300 Indian servants of the Spaniards broke into the storehouse, and worked until sunrise to cart off as much cacao as they could. This came to Alvarado's ears, and he enlisted the aid of one Alonso de Ojeda, who was guarding Motecuhzoma: "When you have turned over your watch and see that it is time, call me, for I also want part of that cacao." They went there with fifty persons, presumably also Indian servants.
Alonso, seeing that it was almost daylight, and they were running out of time, cut the bands of three wicker bins in the warehouse, allowing the cacao beans inside to spill out. His men stuffed their skirts and mantles. Each bin held 600 loads of beans, each load having 24,000 beans. Alvarado and his fellow thieves made off with 43,200,000 beans, and it was not a twentieth of the Emperor's stock.
To give you an idea of the value of a cacao bean, we have the partial list of commodity prices in Tlaxcala in 1545:
· One good turkey hen is worth 100 full cacao beans or 120 shrunken beans.
· A turkey cock is worth 200 cacao beans.
· A hare or forest rabbit is worth 100 cacao beans each
· A small rabbit is worth 30.
· One turkey egg is worth 3 cacao beans.
· An avocado, newly picked, is worth 3 cacao beans; when it is fully ripe, only 1 bean.
· One large tomato will be equivalent to a cacao bean.
· A large sapote fruit, or two small ones, is equal to a cacao bean.
· A large axolotl (larval salamander, an Aztec delicacy) is worth 4 cacao beans.
· A tamale is exchanged for a cacao bean
· Fish wrapped in maize husks is worth 3 cacao beans.
The Spanish tried to get the Aztec merchants to evaluate beans by weight, as was done in Europe. The Aztecs had no system of weights when Europeans arrived. The Spaniards gave up this idea when they were constantly cheated in the weights because of rocks or other debris. They went back to the system of counting each bean to determine how rich one was. Possibly, this gave rise to the term "bean counter" in modern society.
The Spaniards were more than happy to trade with this "happie money" as they called it. But after the conquest, when trade was not only in cacao beans, but in gold and silver as well, those clever Aztec counterfeiters turned their arts on the coin of Spain, and began to reproduce the gold and silver as well as the cacao bean.
When the Spanish arrived in Central America, they encountered peoples drinking the cacahuatl (ca-ca-wa-tay) made of these ground beans, mixed with other flavorings such as vanilla, achiote and chilies. The Maya called it chacau haa, or chocol haa (depending where in the Yucatan one hears it) which means "hot water." The Europeans saw the "savages" drinking something that disgusted almost every man who witnessed this practice. First of all, the natives always poured it back and forth from cup to cup to make it foam. It was dark colored, and they thought of the foam on top as "scum."
And then there was the name. Most of Europe understood the Latinate of "caca" as feces or offal. And to hear the natives rave about this scummy mixture, and offer it to their guests as a great honor, calling it "caca-something" caused the Spanish to avoid drinking it as long as possible. Imagine for a moment their horror at the thought of drinking something that looked like that!
The word chocolate isn't a part of Nauhuatl, the Aztec language. In order to avoid offending those of the Old Country when they imported these cacao beans, the Spaniards took the "chocol" from the Maya, and added it to the Aztec "huatl" and invented a whole new word "chocolhuatl" pronounced "choco-la-tay" for the name of this new beverage. It was so much easier to stomach than anything associated with "caca."
Another problem with introducing this beverage to Europe was the taste. The Aztecs took it cold and savory with chilies and the bitter chocolate. They relished the bitterness and the darkness of the cacao, and in their religion it even was symbolic of blood. It was quaffed as a symbol of the ties between the gods and life and death, and sacrificed to the gods, both as beans and the drink.
The colonists in New Spain drank chocolate every day, but were not pleased with the bitterness of the drink. They began changing the recipe to please their palates, adding first honey and, later, sugar. Europeans also liked it better hot, as the Mayan made it.
The chocolate addiction in New Spain (Mexico City) was more among the ladies of the Spanish colonists than among the men. After a dinner party, the men went into the salon to smoke tobacco and drink brandy, while the women went into the sitting room to visit and drink hot chocolate. These women became so fond of chocolate that they took it two and three times a day. In fact, the Bishop of New Spain petitioned the Pope for a writ to be issued against the use of chocolate because the ladies would come to Mass and the sermon would be interrupted several times when one or another of the ladies' maids would come into the cathedral with a cup of frothy chocolate.
Unfortunately for the Bishop, another faction that was deep into the drinking and importation of chocolate was the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were not only concerned with obtaining enough chocolate for their own use, they became a real force for the spread and importation of cacao beans, and introduction of the delicacy to European palates.
Spain became very involved with chocolate through the 1500s. There was not a noble drawing room without a chocolate service, including specialized cups and vase or pitcher for the frothing of the drink. The aristocracy were completely enamored with the elixir.
The medical community of the time thought that chocolate should be taken every day to maintain a healthy balance of "humors." Medical wisdom then current held that there were four fluids of the human body. The chart below shows the fluid, its properties and the Organ from which they emanate
It was thought that any disease or malady was caused by an imbalance of one or another of these humors. The cure, therefore, would be to take food of the nature of the opposite to your supposed imbalance.
Some of the first experts who evaluated food from the New World saw chocolate as cold and dry, probably because of its unfortunate naming. Since it was usually prepared with vanilla, considered hot because of its mythical "venal" properties, both chocolate and vanilla were thought at one time or another to be aphrodisiacs. Since the chocolate was cold and the vanilla was hot, as were the chilies (speaking of humor and not flavor), some physicians thought that taking chocolate would balance most imbalances a person would have. In other words, chocolate, for a while, was the equivalent of an apple a day.
Modern Chocolate
It wasn't until the Industrial Age that chocolate became anything we would recognize. In 1765, Dr. James Baker of Massachusetts and his partner John Hannon from Ireland invented a process that attached rollers to a grist mill. This process made chocolate cheap enough for the working masses because it took out the handwork. We know this company today as Bakers Chocolate, which we can all buy in the supermarket.
In Holland, Van Houten invented a process to remove half of the cocoa butter and allow the chocolate to be ground into a fine powder (cocoa powder) in 1828. The alkalines added to defatted the cacao darkened the chocolate to the color we are familiar with.
In France and Italy in the late 1700s, chefs began to experiment with chocolate, adding it to crèmes and puddings, ice cream, wafers, cakes and confections. The infamous Marquis de Sade was a confirmed chocoholic, and was always writing to his wife from prison asking for chocolate confections.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the medical community was finally able to leave the Galenic theory of Humors behind, and people could eat according to taste and finances, and not have to try to match their symptoms with the right kind of food. This was the same time that the British moved to wean their navy from grog. The company of J. S. Fry & Sons became the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world because of their exclusive contract with the Royal Navy. Their competitor in England, Cadbury, kept up by obtaining royal privilege as purveyors of chocolate to Queen Vic
toria. Cadbury was also the first to introduce the chocolate box, containing candies and decorated with a painting of Cadbury's young daughter Jessica holding a kitten.
The Victorian era was also a time of rampant food adulteration. As the demand for chocolate for all classes of society continued to rise, unscrupulous companies were known to add such things as powdered dried peas, flour, potato starch, iron rust, pulverized cacao shells, gum, dextrin, or even ground brick to stretch the chocolate. Some even removed all the cacao butter to sell somewhere else. It was replaced with olive oil, sweet almond oil, egg yolks, or suet of veal or mutton. This caused the resulting product to go rancid very quickly.
The British Food and Drug Act of 1860 and the Adulteration of Food Act of 1872 drove chocolate companies to show the percentage of real chocolate in their product. Today the English are great consumers of chocolate, eating more per capita than America, even though the product is still seventy percent sugar.
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 in the United States finally forced unscrupulous manufacturers to do the same thing. The act was brought on by Teddy Roosevelt after he read the novel "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. The president decided that enough was enough.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, many chocolate factories opened in Switzerland, and today the Swiss are the number one consumers of chocolate, eating eleven pounds per person per year compared to America's five pounds per person per year. It was in Switzerland that milk was most successfully added to chocolate. That process was a collaboration between Henri Nestle, the man who discovered the process to make powdered milk, and Daniel Peter, who came up with the method to use the powdered milk with the powdered chocolate to create eating chocolate. The first milk chocolate bar was produced in 1879. The process was simple; they dried out the moisture in the mix and replaced it with cacao butter, so that it could be poured into a mold.
That same year, Rudolph Lindt invented "conching" which rolls the cacao beans for up to seventy-two hours, and heats the beans enough that sometimes they can skip the roasting process altogether. Jean Tobler, inventor of Toblerone, invented "tempering." This means that the temperature of the chocolate liquor is raised, then carefully lowered so that the crystal structure of the fat may be destroyed. This is what makes our modern chocolate so smooth and glossy. It is a vital step in the finest chocolate, which has a high percentage of cacao butter added back in.
Another problem with defatted cocoa powder, is that it is very difficult to get it to mix with milk or water, especially for cold applications. To overcome this, manufacturers have been adding a wetting agent, or emulsifier. The agent of choice is soy lecithin, made for soy beans. It is a cheaper than egg yolks, and can also give a good balance to the chocolate without changing the flavor.
The story of chocolate in the United States of America would be incomplete without a word about Hershey. Milton S. Hershey was born in Pennsylvania in 1857. As a youth, he was apprenticed as a confectioner, and at the age of nineteen opened his own candy shop.
Almost twenty years later, after visiting a World's Fair, and seeing how chocolate was produced in Europe, he decided that chocolate was his calling. He went to Europe and toured confectioners in England and on the continent, then sold his candy business for a million dollars, quite a lot of money in 1893.
With those funds, he bought a large dairy farm in Pennsylvania and built the company town of Hershey, so that he could mechanize the making of chocolate. All the milk that went into his chocolate was from his dairy farms that surrounded the town. All the sugar came from Hershey, Cuba, where he mechanized that process, and bought two electric railroads to carry sugar and passengers to the port and to Havana. The company maintained ownership of this production in Cuba until Castro "nationalized" it.
Hershey was not so much a robber baron as the railroad tycoons or the mine owners, some of whom built towns for the workers in their factories. He was more of a socialist in his attitudes and believed that happy and successful workers were more productive than mere wage slaves. While the town did not have its own government, and he lived in a mansion patterned after George Washington's Mount Vernon, he did not rule as a despot. He built five churches, an industrial school for orphaned boys, a hospital, schools, and a golf course. It was everything he wanted in his ideal American town.
Hershey took all that he learned in Europe, then bought his beans from selected sites in Central and South America, Ceylon, and Java. He bought the new conching and molding machinery from Switzerland, and took America by storm. By the 1920s, his factory was turning out 50,000 pounds of cocoa powder a day. In the 1980s, no less than 25 million Hershey's Kisses rolled off the lot per day. Hershey died at the age of 85, quietly, in the hospital he had built for his company town. Chocolate was never the same again.
Chocolate Processing
In today's modern world, the chocolate we buy in the supermarket is already highly processed. Even the unsweetened baking chocolate would not be recognizable to the Aztecs who introduced chocolate to Europe.
The process for chocolate begins with the pods. Before the beans are removed, the pods must be aged or "fermented." This means that they need to sit for a couple of days in a specific environment and allow the moist fruit around the seeds to soften and change the flavor of the beans.
Next, the beans are roasted and winnowed to remove the hulls. Then they are ground in a heated system. In the sixteenth century this was a mortar and pestle with a brazier underneath it. Then the cocoa nibs from this process were taken to a heated metate, which is a flat stone with a cylindrical roller called a mano. This cylinder is moved by hand to grind the nibs to a paste. Heat is needed in this process because chocolate is more than fifty percent cocoa butter. The resulting paste is difficult to dry because of the high fat content.
On the metate is where the other ingredients are added, such as the spices, sugar, vanilla, or chilies. When the paste is smooth and ready, it was put into brown paper covered molds and left to harden. These wafers were not anything like we would expect of edible chocolate. It was dry and brittle, very very hard. It could be chopped, added to hot water and frothed for a drink, but it was rare that anyone would eat it directly.
Grantville
So where does all this information get us? In 1629 to 1630, before the Ring of Fire, there was probably no chocolate for sale in Germany outside of the northern port cities, or the southern Bavarian cities, such as Munich. Because Spain has tried so hard to keep a monopoly on chocolate, it is slow to become known in Germany. France and Holland were early exposed to its richness, as were the Hapsburgs. But if the Ring of Fire had not delivered Americans in the beginning of this decade, it would be close to thirty years before the habit of chocolate houses and drinking of chocolate, coffee and tea would catch on in central Germany and the northern parts of Europe.
But with the financial connections in Grantville, chocolate is already being traded. There are already people in town with their own supplies of cacao nibs. These are not anywhere near commercial quantities. With the transported Americans craving Snickers and M&Ms, the demand for chocolate would probably outstrip the demand for coffee.
The chocolate that is bought is not the chocolate that Grantville is expecting. What will be imported will be the cacao beans and the professional chocolatier who knows the process of grinding and mixing. Europeans are enjoying sweetmeats and other delicacies of sugar, but chocolate of this time is strictly for drinking. No one has thought of eating solid chocolate, because it does not look like anything you want to bite.
The Grantvillers will need to build their own versions of the processes of Dutching, conching, and tempering, which will be intensive and time consuming, as well as expensive. As there are many Jews that are displaced from Spain at the moment, it is not inconceivable that one of them would be a master chocolatier, who is an expert of grinding and mixing cacao paste. These people would be more than happy to ply their profession for the Theobroma-starved masses of up-timers in t
he USE. It may be a couple of years before we get Toblerone, but brownies and fudge should be available by 1633 of the Ring of Fire. And because of the demand the chocolate eaters of Grantville, by 1634, we will have modern chocolate.
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