CHOCOLATE: A USER'S MANUAL

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The Physiology of Taste, 1825

AMBERGRIS, A WAXY Sub stance derived from sperm whales, is hard to come by these days. Chocolate, mercifully, is not. Cocoa beans are the third largest international cash crop, after coffee and sugar. While the United States doesn't grow any of those beans, it does lead in the manufacture of chocolate. Americans consume an average of 12 pounds per person per year, which puts them fifth in the world, behind the Swiss (22 pounds), the English (15), the West Germans (14) and the Belgians (13.6). With magazines, newsletters, associations and festivals devoted entirely to its celebration, chocolate has become a sweet obsession.

Food of the Gods

A native of Central America, the cocoa tree has been cultivated for centuries. The Aztecs considered it a gift from Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom and knowledge, who gave them the arts, the calendar and chocolate. Cocoa was so valuable that the beans were used as currency: eight for a rabbit, 100 for a slave. What the Aztecs didn't spend they smashed into a paste, then mixed with water or wine for a rather bitter, peppery beverage. Montezuma II adored it. The last emperor of the Aztecs, he drank 50 flagons a day—cold and frothy, seasoned with honey, spices and vanilla (another Central American native).

According to legend, Quetzalcoad bequeathed his gifts and sailed away, promising to return in the year One Reed, which came around every 52 years. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, one such recurrence was A.D. 1519, the year Hernan Cortes landed on the shores of Mexico. Believing the Conquistador to be the returning god, Montezuma welcomed him (with, among other things, cups of chocolate). The invaders learned what they could from the natives, killed Montezuma, razed the high Aztec civilization and sailed back to Spain with their spoils, including beans from the cocoa tree— Theobroma cacao, or "food of the gods."

From the Spanish Court (an international trendsetter in those days) the beverage spread throughout Europe. Soon there were chocolate houses across the continent, where young gentlemen of the upper classes met to gossip, gamble and fashion empires. In Great Britain chocolate became sufficiently popular to rival honest English ale, and brewers and publicans lobbied to ban the import of cocoa (they failed). A century later, even the colonials got wind of the European craze; Massachusetts sea captains sailed to the Caribbean for cocoa. In 1765 Dr. James Baker of Dorchester, Massachusetts, joined forces with John Hannon, an Irish chocolate maker, to establish the first chocolate factory in the United States.

Today, Baker's is the most common form of unsweetened chocolate on the market. From a sweet-toothed point of view, the nineteenth century was momentous. Until then, chocolate had remained exclusively a beverage. The ground-up beans, or chocolate liquor, were far too dry and bitter to eat. But in 1828 a Dutch chemist in search of a better beverage figured out how to extract the cocoa butter, the rich vegetable fat that makes up more than half of the beans. This left cocoa powder (which made an excellent drink) and huge slabs of rich, ivory-colored cocoa butter—too good to waste. The English mixed the butter with more chocolate liquor and gave us eating chocolate.