UNIT 19

1	Chocolate was unknown in Europe until Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) returned from the first European explorations in the New World.  What would eventually become the favorite food and drink of millions took a long time and many innovations to become popular.
2	Columbus, who thought he had reached India, not a new continent, returned with many new treasures, many of them agricultural.  He presented them all to his patrons, the Spanish King Ferdinand (1452-1516) and his wife, Queen Isabella (1451-1504).  They were probably not impressed with their first view of the small dark bitter cocoa beans, and could not have imagined how these beans might one day become the source of an international chocolate industry.
3	The first person to turn cocoa beans into something commercially important was the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez (1485-1547).  Cortez is most remembered for his brutal conquest of Mexico.  When introduced to the Aztec Emperor Montezuma in 1519, he and his men were offered grand gold cups of the emperorfs royal drink, chocolatl, meaning warm liquid.  Montezuma evidently drank fifty or more cups of it daily. 
4	However, the Spanish soldiers were more impressed by the gold cups than the drink.  The Aztec preparation of chocolatl did nothing to change the cocoa beanfs natural bitterness.  To adjust the drink for European tastes, Cortez and others decided to sweeten it with cane sugar.
5	When they took this sweetened chocolatl back to Spain, the drink became popular, especially when combined with several other newly-discovered spices, such as cinnamon, vanilla and even hot chili pepper.  Eventually, people began to serve chocolatl as a hot drink.
6	Hot chocolate soon became all the rage among the Spanish aristocracy and Spain established cocoa plantations in its new colonies.  But the Spanish carefully guarded the secrets of chocolatl production, and more than a hundred years would pass before the process was revealed by monks, whose job it was to work with the raw ingredients. 
7	Chocolatl spread throughout Europe and was made fashionably by various kings and queens.  The habit of chocolate drinking spread to England, where in 1657, the first of many famous chocolate houses appeared.
8	Eventually, the traditional methods of making chocolate by hand, used by small shops, gave way to mass production and the use of steam engines to help in the cocoa grinding process.  By 1730, chocolate had dropped in price so most people could afford to drink it.  The invention of the cocoa press in 1828 reduced the price even further and helped to improve the quality of the beverage by squeezing out part of the cocoa butter, the fat that occurs naturally in cocoa beans.  Chocolate tasted much more like what we are now used to.
9	In the nineteenth century, two major improvements were made to chocolate.  The first came in 1847, when an English company introduced a smooth chocolate for eating.  The second development occurred in 1876, in Vevey, Switzerland, when Daniel Peter found a way to add milk to chocolate, creating the product we enjoy today known as milk chocolate.