Chocolate - A Contemporary Of Thousands Of Years

2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29

Sweet, in holes, white, bitter, milky, black or in foil, between the tops of a perfect cake, liquid, with nuts or not! He is the chocolate, the undisputed master of desserts and the king of all sweets!

As you reach for another piece, it hardly occurs to you that melting pleasure has tempted man for millennia. Its history is ancient and dates back to about 4000 BC. In those distant times, cocoa grew freely in the tropics of South and Central America. Where exactly - whether in the Amazon, in Honduras or in the Yucatan, historians are still debating.

Around 1500 BC, the Olmecs, an ancient Indian people who inhabited a small part of present-day Mexico, were already making cocoa, which at the time was still considered a beverage. It is made from crushed beans, spices and water.

The story of chocolate was marked by the Maya and Aztecs, who were the first peoples to grow the cocoa tree and who revered it as the source of the drink of the gods. The famous chocolate, then called xocoatl, was used in rituals, but also because of its therapeutic properties. It often contained ground cocoa beans, spices, hot peppers, vanilla, milk and water, and sometimes cornmeal was added to thicken the drink. However, cocoa beans had another use - they served as a bargaining chip, which shows how valuable they were at the time.

Christopher Columbus was the first European to obtain cocoa beans - they were given to him by the Indians in Guanaya, an island where he landed in 1502. But since he did not appreciate the taste of the unknown drink at all, he forgot them and even seemed to throw them away. Thus Cortes, the man who discovered cocoa during the conquest of Mexico, was crowned the first to bring beans to Europe in 1528.

He then met with King Carl V of Spain and told him that a cup of this special drink allows a person to spend a whole day without eating. Since the 17th century, chocolate has been highly valued by the Spanish aristocracy and clergy.

And while the story of chocolate is very old, its production is far from. Chocolate manufacturers began operations in the late 17th century, but its actual production became massive in the 19th century. By the end of the century, chocolate factories flourished in France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Belgium. Among the new manufacturers of chocolate are Suchard from 1824, Tobler from 1868, Lindt in 1879 and Côte d’Or in 1880.

When you break off the chocolate bar, you can hardly imagine that the first one was created in 1936 by a pharmacist, Manie. Previously, chocolate was produced as a cocoa dough.

Thus, the chocolate bar inherits the long history of cocoa - from time immemorial to the present day.