Chocolate's Long Road: From a Bitter Mesoamerican Drink to the Bean-to-Bar Revival
For about ninety percent of its history, chocolate was a drink, and not a sweet one. It was bitter, thick, foamed by pouring from a height, spiced with chile, vanilla or flowers, sometimes colored red with achiote, and served to rulers, warriors, priests and the dead. The solid, sweet, milky bar most people picture when they hear the word is a nineteenth-century invention, and the modern craft bar on our shelf is a twenty-first-century attempt to undo some of what the nineteenth did. Here is the whole road, in the order it was traveled.
The tree and the first drinkers
Theobroma cacao is a small tree of the tropical Americas that grows its pods directly from the trunk. Inside each pod, thirty to fifty seeds sit in a sweet white pulp, and the earliest people to use it seem to have been after the pulp, fermented into a mild alcoholic drink, before anyone thought to roast the seeds. Chemical traces of cacao have been found on pottery in Ecuador and southern Mexico dating back more than three thousand years, to the Olmec and their predecessors. By the time of the Classic Maya, from about 250 to 900 AD, cacao was a fully developed drink with its own glyph, painted on vessels and named in inscriptions; the word "cacao" itself comes down to us through Maya languages.
Currency and ceremony
The Aztecs, who could not grow cacao in the high valley of Mexico, imported it as tribute from the lowlands and used the beans as money. Colonial-era records list prices in beans: a turkey, a rabbit, a slave, all priced in cacao, and counterfeiters filled empty husks with earth. The drink, cacahuatl, was for the elite and for soldiers, taken cold and frothy, and Spanish accounts describe the emperor Moctezuma's court consuming it in enormous quantities. It was a stimulant, a status marker and a sacred substance, and it had nothing to do with dessert.
Spain adds sugar
The Spanish brought cacao back across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century and did the thing that would define the next four hundred years: they sweetened it with cane sugar, warmed it, and kept the cinnamon. Chocolate became a hot, sweet drink of the Spanish court, spread to Italy and France through royal marriages, and by the 1650s London had chocolate houses where it was drunk alongside the new coffee. It remained a drink of the wealthy, made by grinding roasted beans on a heated stone into a paste that was shaped into tablets and dissolved in water or milk. The Mexican-style drinking chocolate on our shelf, stone-ground with sugar and cinnamon, is that tradition, barely changed.
The Dutch press, 1828
Cacao beans are about half fat, and that fat, cocoa butter, made the colonial drink rich to the point of greasiness. In 1828 the Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten patented a hydraulic press that squeezed most of the butter out of the ground beans, leaving a dry cake that could be pulverized into cocoa powder. Treated with alkali, "Dutched," the powder dissolved easily and tasted milder. Chocolate became a cheap, easy drink for everyone, and, just as important, the press produced a surplus of cocoa butter that had to go somewhere.
The bar, 1847 to 1879
Where it went was back into ground cacao. In 1847 the English firm J. S. Fry & Sons mixed cocoa powder, sugar and melted cocoa butter into a paste that could be molded, and sold the first eating chocolate bar. It was gritty and slightly bitter. In 1875 the Swiss maker Daniel Peter, working near Henri Nestlé's new condensed-milk business, added dried milk and made the first milk chocolate. And in 1879 Rodolphe Lindt, also Swiss, left a mixing machine running over a weekend and found that hours of stirring and warming produced a smooth, melting chocolate with none of the grit; he called the process conching. Sugar, press, milk, conche: in fifty years chocolate had gone from a bitter drink to the solid sweet bar of the modern world, and Switzerland had taken ownership of it.
The industrial century
The twentieth century made chocolate universal and, mostly, worse. Milton Hershey built a town around a milk chocolate bar; Cadbury and Mars sold it by the million; cacao became a commodity graded by yield rather than flavor, grown on vast plantations in West Africa, where most of the world's supply still comes from. The bar got cheaper, sweeter and more uniform, and the taste of the bean, which varies as much as wine grapes do by variety and place, vanished under sugar and vanilla. By 1990 almost nobody outside the trade had tasted chocolate made from one identifiable origin.
The revival
A small number of makers began asking what chocolate would taste like if it were made the way the Maya drank it, from a specific place, and the way Lindt had made it, with care rather than volume. In the United States, Scharffen Berger in the 1990s and then a wave of makers in the 2000s and 2010s, Dandelion in San Francisco, Dick Taylor in Eureka, Amano in Utah and dozens more, bought beans directly from farms, roasted them in small batches and made bars with two ingredients. In Europe, Friis-Holm in Denmark and others did the same. The movement took the name bean-to-bar, and we explain what it means, why origin matters and how to taste it in three earlier guides. The result is that a bar of Madagascar chocolate tastes of red fruit and a bar of Dominican chocolate tastes of nuts and earth, which is exactly the variation that three thousand years of drinkers knew and one century of industry erased.
What the history explains about the shelf
Why craft bars list two ingredients: because sugar and cacao are all a bar needs, and everything else was added to cover a commodity bean. Why percentage is not quality: because the press and the conche made any percentage possible, and only the bean decides flavor. Why our craft chocolate guide organizes by maker and origin: because that is how the drink was understood before the bar existed. And why drinking chocolate is not a lesser form: it is the original one. The bars and the drinking chocolate are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Moctezuma, by the accounts, drank fifty cups a day. One bar and a good sit is plenty.
