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In 1521 during the conquest of Mexico, Spaniards saw the value of cocoa beans and began to ship them home. Following the Aztec example, the Spanish made a chocolate beverage. Since cocoa beans were expensive to import, the beverage served as a symbol of high social status for the next 300 years. Only Spanish nobility could afford chocolate, and drinking chocolate became a trend in the Spanish court. Soon Spaniards were adding sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and other spices to their chocolate beverage and heating it. The high demand for chocolate required millions of people to harvest, tend and process cacao and sugar. For 200 years the conquered peoples in Mesoamerica were responsible for providing this labor. Plantation owners produced large amounts of chocolate inexpensively by using slave labor.
In the Spanish Catholic Church, the clergy recognized the nutritional properties of chocolate and allowed people to drink it during fasting periods in the 16th Century. Chocolate is naturally high in calories, so it made fasting easier. In 1915 Cortés called chocolate a "divine drink which builds up resistance and fights fatigue." He said "a cup of this precious drink permits a man to walk for a whole day without food," (Field Museum). Chocolate contains caffeine and theobromine. These chemicals may cause feelings of alertness and restoration.
Almost 100 years after chocolate was introduced to Spain, other European countries discovered chocolate. Chocolate became very popular in the European royal courts. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, chocolate was available and affordable to the public. In France, however, chocolate was reserved for members of the French aristocracy. Europeans began growing cacao in Ceylon, Venezuela, Sumatra, Java and the West Indies. Waged and slave laborers from Africa worked on these plantations and in chocolate mills to grind the cocoa beans.
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New machinery, like the steam-driven chocolate mill, enabled chocolate to be mass produced. This advancement brought down the price of chocolate and allowed chocolate to be made in a solid form. In 1828 the cocoa press was invented, which separated cocoa butter from cocoa powder. This allowed batches to be more consistently mixed. The additions of ingredients like alkaline salts and milk made chocolate darker, smoother and milder. Early chocolate was gritty and oily, and these new developments vastly improved the texture and flavor of chocolate. Chocolate was made into candy bars and added to cakes and pastries for flavoring.
Today chocolate is mostly machine-made, but cacao is still grown by hand. Some chocolate manufacturers have their own farms, but most cacao is grown by independent farmers. The farmers still manually harvest, ferment, dry and package cocoa beans before they are sent to manufacturers. Cacao is now grown in many countries across the equator because of the high demand for cocoa beans. Chocolate manufacturers constantly experiment with recipes and ingredients to create new varieties of chocolate.
Interesting Facts about Chocolate
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References
"All About Chocolate: History of Chocolate" The Field Museum.