history of chocolate

Description:

The Chocolate Story

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Once upon a time in a land far, far away (technically, the dense tropical Amazon forests in South America) there grew a very special tree call the cocoa tree. First cultivated by the Mayas of Yucatan and the Aztecs of Mexico, the cocoa tree crop, a bean with magical powers, became very valuable when the Aztec emperor, Montezuma, began consuming a cocoa bean preparation called "chocolatl" regularly. Although Columbus initially brought the cocoa bean to Europe, it was his fellow countryman, Don Cortes, who recognized its commercial value as a drink and sent back to Spain cocoa beans and recipes for the preparation of chocolate. However, it was the Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, who, probably drawing on the Aztec belief that the cocoa tree had divine origins, gave the genus the name "Theobroma" or Food of the Gods. The Spaniards jealously guarded this increasingly popular drink, to which they added sugar as a sweetener. Cultivation of the cocoa tree by the Spaniards in their isolated colony in Trinidad was part of the effort to keep secret the cultivation and preparation of the cocoa bean. Eventually, the Spaniards sought to grow cocoa elsewhere including other West Indian Islands and the Philippines. The popularity of the chocolate drink spread to Italy, Holland and France and finally in the middle 1600s to England, but it remained a drink for the wealthy because of its high cost. By the early eighteenth century, however, prices began to drop and the commercial manufacture of chocolate began in Bristol, England, where the firm of J.S. Fry founded the first chocolate factory in 1728.