Legend has it that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl traveled to earth on a beam of the morning star, bringing with him a cacao tree stolen from Paradise.
According to Traditional Home magazine, he thought it to be the rarest gift he could give to mankind as consolation for living on earth, for the cacao bean - the fruit of the tree - could never be duplicated. As the story goes, Quetzalcoatl was severely punished by the other gods for sharing the sacred food - chocolate - with mortal souls. Mankind has never been sorry.Although baffled by the complexity of the ingredients in chocolate, we have always been delighted with its taste. There is literally nothing else like it. Chemists have tried for years to synthesize the substance but the secret formula of chocolate is to this day safe with the gods.
For most people, chocolate is a luxurious treat to the palate, a precious gift of taste to be personally savored and elegantly offered to loved ones. Christopher Columbus was the first European introduced to the cacao bean while on his fourth voyage to the New World in 1502, but he ignored it. Two decades later in 1528, the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes found the Aztec emperor Montezuma drinking 50 cups a day of a chocolate concoction called xocatl. The liquid was considered so prestigious that the golden goblets it was served in were thrown away after one use.
Cortes was impressed by Montezuma, the taste of xocatl and the fact that cacao beans were used as Aztec currency (about a hundred beans would buy a slave). He returned to Spain, after sowing seeds of the cacao tree on every island along the way, and laid a bejeweled box of the beans at the feet of his king, Charles V. This first gift of chocolate in Europe began a century-long Spanish monopoly on the cacao-bean market.
The product that Cortes discovered, however, was not the sweet of today. It was a very bitter drink. The Aztecs mixed unsweetened chocolate liquid with wine or fermented corn mash instead of water. They put pimiento and pepper in chocolate, as well as other spices. When the Europeans began drinking chocolate in the 16th century, they mixed it with honey, vanilla, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, cinnamon and most importantly, sugar.
By 1700, chocolate was so popular that chocolate houses were competing with coffeehouses in Europe. The notorious lover Casanova frequented them and noted that chocolate was more effective than champagne for inducing romance.
Indeed, Casanova was right. Chocolate contains the mood-altering chemical phenylethylamine, which is identical to a hormone-triggering substance manufactured by the brain when a person is feeling infatuation, love and passion. Psychiatrists today have found that lovesick patients can be soothed emotionally by eating chocolate. In fact, they sometimes crave it.
Dr. James Baker was the first chocolate manufacturer in America. He and Irish immigrant John Hannon opened Baker's in 1765 in Dorchester, Mass., where, like people around the rest of the world, Americans began producing chocolate beverages.
It wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that the process that would lead to solid chocolate bars was developed. The key to unlock the puzzle was found in 1828, when Dutch chemists extracted some of cacao's fat - cocoa butter - and made cocoa powder.
In 1847, the English company Fry & Sons combined cocoa butter and sugar with a paste of ground cacao beans and chocolate magically, it seemed, became a solid food. By 1875, the Swiss had developed solid milk chocolate and created a culinary art.
Although chocolate as a food has a relatively short history, traditions that involve chocolate are well established.
Over time, chocolate has taken on distinctly national flavors. Just as the Hershey bar is an American symbol (especially of the World War II GI), so is Cadbury of the United Kingdom, Godiva of Belgium and Nestle of Switzerland. Nations tend to use preferred ingredients in the manufacture of their chocolates. The Spanish use mostly Brazilian beans while the French use West African and the Netherlanders use Asian. Americans use considerably more sweeteners.