Nobody invented chocolate in a single moment. People in the Americas were preparing cacao thousands of years ago, and for most of its long life chocolate was a drink: bitter, frothy, often spiced with chilli, and nothing like a sweet bar. The bar came much later, in industrial Europe. In 1847 a Bristol firm, J.S. Fry & Sons, made what is usually counted as the first modern chocolate bar, and milk chocolate followed in Switzerland in the 1870s. Between the first cup and the first bar lies one of the great stories in food.
A seed older than the Aztecs
Cacao is the seed of Theobroma cacao, a small tropical tree whose pods grow straight out of its trunk. Crack a pod open and you find beans packed in sweet white pulp. Nothing about those bitter beans suggests a treat, and yet people worked out what to do with them very early.
What the evidence shows is striking. Chemical traces of cacao in pottery from the upper Amazon, in what is now Ecuador, date back more than 5,000 years. In Mesoamerica, residues in vessels from the Pacific coast of southern Mexico go back to around 1900 BC, and pots from the Olmec centre of San Lorenzo show cacao use too. So by the time the Aztecs rose to power in the 1400s, cacao had already been part of life in the region for thousands of years. They inherited chocolate; they did not invent it.
The Maya: chocolate with a crown of foam
The Maya wrote about cacao, painted it and buried it with their dead. Their word, kakaw, appears in hieroglyphs on drinking vessels. One lidded pot from a tomb at Río Azul in Guatemala, dating to around the 5th century AD, carries the cacao glyph and still held residue that tested positive for it. Maya art shows the drink being poured from a height into a vessel held low, to raise a thick foam. The foam was the prize.
This was not an everyday pleasure for everyone. Cacao belonged to feasts, offerings and marriage customs, and its beans had real value. The Maya made many versions of the drink, some thickened with maize, some flavoured with chilli or flowers.
The Aztecs: bitter water and money that grew on trees
The Aztecs (the Mexica) lived in the highland Valley of Mexico, too cool and dry for cacao trees, so beans came to them as trade and tribute from the lowlands. There, they were valuable enough to work as small change. A document from the 1540s sets out market prices in cacao beans, and Spanish accounts even describe counterfeit beans, hollowed out and filled with earth.
The drink, which the Aztecs called cacahuatl, was mainly for nobles, merchants and warriors. It was unsweetened, frothed and flavoured with things like chilli, vanilla and fragrant dried flowers. One Spanish eyewitness, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, remembered great jugs of foaming cacao being brought to the emperor Moctezuma at his meals. That memory is the seed of the much-repeated, and much-inflated, tale that he drank fifty cups a day. Even the word "chocolate" is a small mystery: it seems to have appeared after the Spanish arrived, and scholars still debate exactly how it formed.
Across the Atlantic, and a spoonful of sugar
Columbus came across cacao beans in 1502, aboard a trading canoe off the coast of Central America, apparently without grasping what they were. The popular story that Hernán Cortés carried chocolate home to Spain has no documents behind it. The first recorded chocolate in Spain arrived in 1544, when Dominican friars brought a delegation of Maya nobles from Guatemala to the court of the future Philip II, with cacao among their gifts. The first known commercial cargo of beans reached Seville in 1585.
Spain made the drink its own. Most of the chilli went; cane sugar, cinnamon and, crucially, heat came in. Hot, sweet chocolate became a fashion of the Spanish court and then of Catholic Europe, where churchmen argued over whether it was a food, and so broke a fast, or merely a drink. Royal marriages and travelling clergy spread it further, and London's first chocolate house was advertised in 1657. For another two centuries, though, chocolate was still something you drank.
How the bar was born
Turning a gritty, fatty drink into a bar that snaps cleanly took machines. In 1828 Coenraad van Houten in Amsterdam patented a press that squeezed out much of the cocoa butter, leaving a powder that mixed easily into liquid. Treating it with alkaline salts, a process now called "Dutching", made it darker and milder. Cocoa powder, and a supply of spare cocoa butter, opened the door to solid chocolate.
In 1847 Fry's of Bristol combined cocoa powder, sugar and melted cocoa butter into a paste that could be pressed into moulds. In Switzerland, Daniel Peter spent years working out how to add milk without spoiling the chocolate. His success is usually dated to 1875, with help from the milk products of his neighbour in Vevey, Henri Nestlé. Then in 1879 Rodolphe Lindt's conching machine, which stirred chocolate for hours on end, gave it the melting smoothness we now take for granted. The drink of Maya lords had become a snack anyone could slip into a pocket.
Chocolate at home: drink it the old way
The best way to taste chocolate's history is to go back to where it started: a cup. A few tips:
- Skip the packet. Whisk good cocoa powder or finely chopped dark chocolate into hot milk, or into water as in Mesoamerica, over a low heat. Don't let it boil hard, or it can catch and turn grainy.
- Spice it gently. A pinch of cinnamon, a little vanilla and the smallest pinch of chilli bring back some of the old flavours. A grain of salt makes the chocolate taste rounder.
- Make foam. Mexican cooks spin a wooden molinillo between their palms. A whisk or a milk frother does the same job, or you can pour carefully from a height between two jugs, as the Maya did.
- Go easy on sugar. Aztec cacao had none. Start with less than you think and add to taste.
Cocoa is often marketed as a superfood, but the evidence for health benefits from everyday chocolate is limited, so enjoy it for what it is: one of the world's great pleasures. If you want recipes to cook from, The Anti-Inflammatory Kitchen has a whole run of them, from a steaming Anti-Inflammatory Hot Cacao to Chocolate Date Truffles, Dark Chocolate & Seed Bark and a Flourless Chocolate-Almond Cake. You can also search every chocolate recipe in the collection with the recipe finder, or browse all twelve cookbooks.
Questions people ask
Who invented chocolate?
No single person. Peoples of the Americas were using cacao more than 5,000 years ago, and the Olmec, Maya and Aztecs all made cacao drinks. The solid bar is a European invention of the 19th century, usually credited to Fry's of Bristol in 1847.
Did the Aztecs eat chocolate?
They drank it. Aztec cacao was an unsweetened, frothy drink, often spiced with chilli and vanilla and usually served cool rather than hot. Sweet, solid chocolate did not exist yet.
When was milk chocolate invented?
In Switzerland in the 1870s. Daniel Peter is credited with the first successful milk chocolate, usually dated to 1875, using milk products from his neighbour Henri Nestlé.
Is white chocolate really chocolate?
It is made from cocoa butter, the fat of the cacao bean, with sugar and milk, but no cocoa solids. That is why it tastes of cream and vanilla rather than cocoa.