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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And today we're

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Speaker 1: talking chocolate because you know, October is coming up as

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Speaker 1: we keep on mentioning, and I know a lot of

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Speaker 1: you are going to be eating chocolate pretty soon. You're

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Speaker 1: probably already snatching up this Reese's multi packs at the store. Well,

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Speaker 1: and for us, it's late afternoon, which, of course is

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Speaker 1: that like crash chocolate time of day during the work

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Speaker 1: that Yeah, I just finished my peanut butter Eminem's but

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Speaker 1: my favorite. I love Dove and I love Godiva, but

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Speaker 1: I'm really more of a salty person. But for purposes

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Speaker 1: of this podcast, you, I'm I'm very into chocolate because

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Speaker 1: of course we're talking about the history of chocolate. But

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Speaker 1: I have a question. So you've admitted you like chocolate

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Speaker 1: well enough, if you were about to be sacrificed and

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Speaker 1: you didn't quite feel up to dancing before or your

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Speaker 1: own death, would you maybe feel a little bit better

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Speaker 1: if somebody gave you a chocolate drink kind of perk

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Speaker 1: you up? Uh, you know, I'm I think I'm going

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Speaker 1: to have to go with a no. And that it

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Speaker 1: might have blood of like previously sacrificed victims in it.

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Speaker 1: Does that add a little enticement? I mean, if I

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Speaker 1: if I could have a nice Coca cola instead, is

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Speaker 1: that an option? I don't think, so chocolate or nothing. Katie, Well,

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Speaker 1: I'm not an as tech, so surely that's not the

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Speaker 1: case for me. Because this information was according to Chloe,

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Speaker 1: do to russell Um and these Aztec sacrifice victims got

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Speaker 1: a gourd of chocolate mixed with victims blood to you know,

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Speaker 1: perk them up if they were depressed for being human sacrifices.

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Speaker 1: Don't think that would do it for me. I think

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Speaker 1: I'd still feel pretty sad. And there's cocoa in the

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Speaker 1: break room, it doesn't have blood in it. I think

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Speaker 1: I'm already set. I'd rather not be sacrificed. But this

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Speaker 1: gives you a clue perhaps that the history of chocolate

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Speaker 1: is a lot less sweet than it might seem. So

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Speaker 1: let's get down to basics and talk about where we

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Speaker 1: get chocolate In the first place, that would be from

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Speaker 1: the plant cow, and chocolate starts with this equatorial tree

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Speaker 1: that grows fruit not from the tips of its branches

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Speaker 1: like most trees, but from its trunk and from its

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Speaker 1: really thick branches. It's very bizarre. I would definitely recommend

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Speaker 1: early in this podcast you go and google the cocao

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Speaker 1: tree to see exactly what this looks like. Yeah, and

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Speaker 1: it's The tree is called the fia Broma cocaw and

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Speaker 1: its scientific name means food of the gods. And it

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Speaker 1: produces this small fruit with white pulp and seeds that we,

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Speaker 1: of course often call beans. And when we make chocolate today,

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Speaker 1: the initial processing is much like it's always been. The

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Speaker 1: seeds are harvested by hand. They're fermented for about a

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Speaker 1: week and then dried and roasted. And things have changed

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Speaker 1: a lot beyond that step. But Sarah is going to

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Speaker 1: tell you what usually happens today. Yeah. Usually after roasting,

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Speaker 1: the beans are winnowed, which means the nib of the

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Speaker 1: bean is removed from the husk, and then from mary

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Speaker 1: you can use the husk as garden compost or animal feed.

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Speaker 1: It smells really good still, and the nibs are ground

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Speaker 1: into a liquid called chocolate liquor. And we have an

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Speaker 1: article on the site called how Chocolate Works, and the

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Speaker 1: author Marshall Brain compares this to how if you grind

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Speaker 1: up solid peanuts, it makes liquid e peanut butter. If

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Speaker 1: you're having a hard time imagining how a liquor comes

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Speaker 1: from this hard, dried up nib. So if you let

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Speaker 1: that harden, if you let that mixture you've created harden,

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Speaker 1: you have pure chocolate, pure, very bitter chocolate. Not the

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Speaker 1: kind of thing you would want to eat, but maybe

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Speaker 1: you would want to bake with it. And if you

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Speaker 1: want to keep going though make it something palatable, you

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Speaker 1: can keep processing it, running it through a coco press

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Speaker 1: to remove the fat. And this leaves you with two

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Speaker 1: main products. One is cocoa butter, which of course is

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Speaker 1: used in a lot of cosmetic products. Yeah, there's cocoa solids,

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Speaker 1: which you grind those up. Then you have cocoa powder.

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Speaker 1: And then finally we get to the point where we

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Speaker 1: can add good stuff like sugar and milk solids and

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Speaker 1: flavors like vanilla, and you can perform further treatments to

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Speaker 1: make the consistency nice, smooth, delicious chocolate e kind of

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Speaker 1: thing we're used to, and also to treat it so

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Speaker 1: it all sticks together so it doesn't crumble into gross

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Speaker 1: dust when you bite into the candy or um. But

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Speaker 1: the really old one. Yeah, but those are the advanced treatments,

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Speaker 1: the advanced ways that we produce chocolate today, to produce

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Speaker 1: eating chocolate. But for almost its entire history, chocolate has

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Speaker 1: not been a food. It's been a drink. And part

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Speaker 1: of why we picked this topic is because of National

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Speaker 1: Hispanic Heritage Month, because chocolate is very much a Mesoamerican creation.

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Speaker 1: So we're going to start with a tall ceramic cylinder

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Speaker 1: of frothy chocolate foam, which was the stuff the classic

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Speaker 1: period Maya would drink back around two fifty. And this

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Speaker 1: beverage isn't close to anything that we would recognize, not

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Speaker 1: the cocoa in the breakroom. No, it was made from

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Speaker 1: cocaw beans that have been fermented, dried, and roasted before

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Speaker 1: being ground into a paste. And this paste was hardened

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Speaker 1: into a cake that was then crumbled into water and

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Speaker 1: poured back and forth to infuse it with air and

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Speaker 1: make this filmy froind of like a waterfall that actually

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Speaker 1: stand up and pour it from a height so it

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Speaker 1: would just get as much air in there as pike

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Speaker 1: picturing cocktail shakers. Um. It would sometimes contain flowers, herbs,

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Speaker 1: spices or vanilla, but it was very, very bitter, like

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Speaker 1: if you mixed baking chocolate with water. That's the closest

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Speaker 1: approximation you could make now. But it was a very

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Speaker 1: special drink and it was favored by the royalty even then.

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Speaker 1: Though it was still something that most people could drink

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Speaker 1: on occasion. It was a special pain. It was pretty

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Speaker 1: comparable to champagne. Actually, something you would drink at birth

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Speaker 1: or weddings or sell brations, and archaeological evidence showed that

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Speaker 1: most people had a tree growing in their yard, so

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Speaker 1: it was something that people were exposed to and it

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Speaker 1: had religious significance to chl was a god of cocow

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Speaker 1: growers and merchants. But until recently we didn't know of

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Speaker 1: any chocolate use that came much before five hundred BC,

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Speaker 1: which was dated from Mayan pottery found in northern Belize.

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Speaker 1: But there was a more recent discovery that changed our

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Speaker 1: thoughts on that. So yeah. In two thousand and seven,

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Speaker 1: some scientists started running tests on a cash of pottery

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Speaker 1: found in the Aluah Valley perhaps and they discovered that

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Speaker 1: this pottery had traces of theo Bra mine, which is

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Speaker 1: coco's chemical calling card, that is chocolate. You like that

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Speaker 1: alliteration there, it's the it's the thing that makes chocolate chocolate.

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Speaker 1: And this, the pottery that they found, was a lot

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Speaker 1: older than any of the stuff they had found before.

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Speaker 1: It dated anywhere from fourteen hundred BC to eleven d BC.

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Speaker 1: So suddenly we have definitive evidence of chocolate consumption way

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Speaker 1: way earlier than we had originally thought. So moving on

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Speaker 1: to the Aztec people and the famous introduction of chocolate

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Speaker 1: to the West. In fact, the Aztec word for the

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Speaker 1: frothy cocaw beverage, which I am not going to try

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Speaker 1: to pronounce, is where the word chocolate comes from, starts

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Speaker 1: with an ex. Y'all, we don't do great with it

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Speaker 1: with the words that start with an X, except for

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Speaker 1: xylophone maybe, um. But the Aztec didn't just drink chocolate,

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Speaker 1: they required it as a tribute. Cocao seeds were considered money,

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Speaker 1: which is maybe the first push towards cocao as a commodity.

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Speaker 1: And we found all sorts of trivia that we love.

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Speaker 1: But according to a sixteenth century az Tech document, one

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Speaker 1: cocow being equaled one to molly and one hundred beans

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Speaker 1: equaled one turkey. Hen which what are you going to

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Speaker 1: do with one cocal bean? I would take the to Molly.

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Speaker 1: I think they're going to put it in the display

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Speaker 1: of bizarre objects on their desk. But the Aztecs also

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Speaker 1: ascribed a lot of religious ceremonial properties to the beans,

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Speaker 1: so maybe that's why it would be good to have

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Speaker 1: even just one bean. They also had a chocolate god

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Speaker 1: named Kuetso Kato who brought cacao from paradise. And it's

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Speaker 1: interesting here we're going to sort of venture outside of

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Speaker 1: the Aztecs for a minute, but chocolate still has a

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Speaker 1: lot of religious significance today. I mean you probably eat

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Speaker 1: it around Christmas. Maybe you couldn't. We always get an

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Speaker 1: advent calendar and oh yes, to day you get your

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Speaker 1: little piece of chocolate. Um. Obviously, Easter a big chocolate

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Speaker 1: eating holiday in Hanaka and in Mexico, it's included in

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Speaker 1: Day of the Dead offerings and sometimes it's it's still

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Speaker 1: included in the form of actual cacao seeds, so not

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Speaker 1: just little tinfoil wrap chocolates, but the real deal. And consequently,

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Speaker 1: going back to our ads text, chocolate was an elite

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Speaker 1: beverage because you know, it has all these religious and

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Speaker 1: ceremonial properties, and also because it was used as tribute

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Speaker 1: um and it was especially reserved for the rulers, the priests,

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Speaker 1: the high soldiers, and the very wealthy. And that's why

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Speaker 1: when Hernando Cortez showed up in the early fifteen hundreds,

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Speaker 1: the Aztec king Montezuma, offered him a drink. He thought

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Speaker 1: Cortez was a visiting god, so a couple of big

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Speaker 1: mistakes there. But Cortes doesn't even like the drink, so

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Speaker 1: he's obviously not a god. And then he doesn't like

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Speaker 1: the chocolate drink. But I mean that's understandable. It is

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Speaker 1: pretty bitter and probably hard to take for European palates.

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Speaker 1: So the conquete stores start mixing up the beverage, though

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Speaker 1: they can tell that something's going on with it. The

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Speaker 1: Aztecs are very into cacao, so they start mixing it,

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Speaker 1: adding things like honey or sugar or vanilla, and they

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Speaker 1: start heating it, so we're getting a little bit closer

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Speaker 1: to what we think of is coco now. And they

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Speaker 1: also started whisking it with a tool they called a molinillo.

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Speaker 1: Instead of that pouring it back and forth up and

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Speaker 1: while Columbus had taken some cacao back to Spain after

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Speaker 1: his fourth voyage in fifteen o two. A popular legend

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Speaker 1: has Dominican friars presenting Mesoamericans at court. The people offered

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Speaker 1: chocolate as a gift, and things cut on from there,

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Speaker 1: but really only in the Spanish court and among high

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Speaker 1: church officials. And it's amazing, but the Spanish were able

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Speaker 1: to keep this secret for a really long time, so

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Speaker 1: they had this secret drink that only the Spanish court

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Speaker 1: knew about. It's almost a century of Spanish lockdown on chocolate.

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Speaker 1: But finally, obviously the word got out, and by the

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Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds a lot of Spanish princesses were going off

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Speaker 1: and marrying into other royal houses and taking their chocolate

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Speaker 1: with them, and you could find coco in courts across Europe.

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Speaker 1: In France, it was supposedly introduced by Anne of Austria,

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Speaker 1: who was the Spanish King's daughter. She married Louis and

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Speaker 1: I was thinking it's funny since she's supposedly responsible for

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Speaker 1: bringing chocolate to France. The imported French queen and always

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Speaker 1: bring like the best stuff with them lepons of Medici

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Speaker 1: and the fork. That's a pretty good one. Let this

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Speaker 1: be a lesson to you all. It became a royal

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Speaker 1: monopoly actually, and in the Spanish Church it became an

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Speaker 1: acceptable fasting beverage, which is so funny because now that's

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Speaker 1: something people often give up for lent. Yeah, exactly. Um.

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Speaker 1: And this is another sort of strange church related story.

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Speaker 1: But supposedly eighteenth century cardinals would drink it when they

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Speaker 1: elected a new pope, and it was so important and

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Speaker 1: so much a part of the high Church officials daily

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Speaker 1: lives that maybe it disguised the poison that killed Pope

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Speaker 1: Clement in seventeen seventy four. So it's a rumor there.

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Speaker 1: But what if chocolate killed you? Mysterious pope death? In

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Speaker 1: sixteen fifty seven, the first chocolate house opened in London,

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Speaker 1: and let's not think of that as this place people

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Speaker 1: just went around sipping cocoa like a romantic venue. You know.

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Speaker 1: It was a place for something. A lot of them

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Speaker 1: are just for men, just to socialize and gamble and

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Speaker 1: talk politics, which Sarah said, it's hard to imagine getting

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Speaker 1: very radical over coco. It's more of a comforting traditional

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Speaker 1: I would say, cover up with your cocoa and your

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Speaker 1: marshmallows on top and book or something. But even while

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Speaker 1: it's still an elite beverage, you know, it's not something

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Speaker 1: that a whole lot of people are drinking. In Europe,

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Speaker 1: the demand for cocao became pretty intense very quickly, and

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Speaker 1: so the Spanish and the English, Dutch and the French

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Speaker 1: all started plantations, not just in Mesoamerica anymore, but all

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Speaker 1: around the equator, anywhere that the cow tree would grow.

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Speaker 1: And it's a very intensive crop, like a lot of

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Speaker 1: New World crops where tobacco comes to mind. Um, it

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Speaker 1: was a lot of work to grow it. And so

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Speaker 1: the first people enslave to produce cocao where the native

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Speaker 1: meso America. But because a lot of them were so

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Speaker 1: quickly wiped out by these imported European diseases, plantation owners

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Speaker 1: turned to Africa and African slaves, and from the early

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Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds to the late eighteen hundreds most cacao was

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Speaker 1: grown under slave labor, and even after slavery was abolished,

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Speaker 1: the working conditions on these farms continued to be atrocious.

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Speaker 1: This isn't the right place in our timeline, but By

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Speaker 1: nineteen ten, chocolate maker William Cadbury asked several companies to

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Speaker 1: join him in boycotting companies that used unfair labor practices UM,

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Speaker 1: and that year the US band coco produced by slave labor.

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Speaker 1: But today most cacao was produced by independent farmers who

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Speaker 1: sell it as a global commodity through the coffee, sugar

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Speaker 1: and cocoa exchange. But that's the end stage of the

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Speaker 1: industrialization of chocolate. In the seventeen hundreds, we were just

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Speaker 1: at the beginning. So let's jump back a little. Part

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Speaker 1: of the reason why chocolate was so expensive and just

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Speaker 1: for the elite, is because it was an expensive import.

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Speaker 1: Cocao was expensive, sugar was expensive, but it was also

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Speaker 1: expensive to produce the stuff. To grind the beans, it's

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Speaker 1: a lot of work. And the beans would come from

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Speaker 1: the New World fermented and dried already, but they'd be

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Speaker 1: ground in Europe. So people spent the next few years

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Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to process these as quickly

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Speaker 1: and cheaply as possible. So we get wind driven chocolate

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Speaker 1: mills and horse driven chocolate mills, which I kind of

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Speaker 1: like the sound of that. UM. Even a Hylian man

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Speaker 1: holds man hold chocolate mills, maybe not um hydraulic machines

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Speaker 1: to grind up the seeds, and finally, with the invention

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Speaker 1: of the steam engine, we get a steam powered chocolate mill.

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Speaker 1: So at this point cocao could be ground in huge quantities,

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Speaker 1: really cheaply, really quickly, and it made it taste better too. Suddenly,

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Speaker 1: with all of this finely ground product, you could experiment

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Speaker 1: make some new products out of it, which is something,

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Speaker 1: of course important if it's going to be eaten as

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Speaker 1: a solid. And from there we've got a whole slew

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Speaker 1: of inventions that followed to make chocolate what we know

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Speaker 1: it today, something you mostly eat instead of something mostly drink.

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Speaker 1: In eighty eight C. J. Van Hounten of the Netherlands

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Speaker 1: patented chocolate powder. He pressed out cocoa butter from ground

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Speaker 1: and roasted beans and added alkaline salt to improve the

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Speaker 1: powders mix ability. And in eighteen forty seven the English

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Speaker 1: firm Fry and Sons combined cocoa butter with chocolate liquor

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Speaker 1: and sugar to produce eating chocolate, which that's what we

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Speaker 1: eat today. We just don't call it eating chocolate anymore.

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Speaker 1: And in eighteen seventy six Daniel Peter and Arina Sla

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Speaker 1: or should we just say nastle. I keep thinking of

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Speaker 1: the Friends episode with Phoebe and her grandmother and the

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Speaker 1: mysterious cookie recipe. Um. But anyways, those two add dried

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Speaker 1: melt to make milk chocolate, which probably pushes the whole

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Speaker 1: consumption of chocolate into a whole new realm. And another

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Speaker 1: big thing is obviously advertising getting people to think they

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Speaker 1: actually need chocolate, it's something that they need to buy

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Speaker 1: it and too well as a treat, but but a

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Speaker 1: treat that is definitely within reach. And turning chocolate not

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Speaker 1: into just a drink or just a candy that you

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Speaker 1: eat in bar form, but something you cook with you

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Speaker 1: make moose and cake and frosting and crucial baking ingredient.

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Speaker 1: Good job advertising. Finally, chocolate started to become a global

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Speaker 1: commodity in the late eighteen hundreds, and soldiers helped spread

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Speaker 1: the taste for it worldwide. Queen Victoria sent her soldiers

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Speaker 1: gifts of chocolate, were saying, she pops up in an

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Speaker 1: awful lot of our podcast where you least expect her um,

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Speaker 1: And in World War One, chocolate was part of rations. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: but the bigger chocolate companies played a very large role

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Speaker 1: in transforming chocolate into something that was not elite anymore,

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Speaker 1: but still a special treat, you know, like if you

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Speaker 1: were buying nice chocolates today, transforming it from something like

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Speaker 1: that into something that you can just buy on impulse,

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Speaker 1: the junkie mart and the lobby. Exactly, it's cheap, it's

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Speaker 1: late afternoon, and you need to pick me up. So

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Speaker 1: the biggest American manufacturer, Milton Hershey, had a lot to

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Speaker 1: do with that. He started his company in nine after

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Speaker 1: visiting the Chicago World's Fair, which we always get requests for, um.

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Speaker 1: He saw some chocolate making machinery and went home with

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Speaker 1: some of it in his own possession, and you go

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Speaker 1: to the Farreny buy machinery and started experimenting, trying to

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Speaker 1: figure out how the Swiss produced their famous chocolate and

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Speaker 1: eventually getting the formula down. But there's still one big

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Speaker 1: market that hasn't gone chocolate crazy yet, and that's China. Apparently,

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Speaker 1: the average Chinese person only eats three point five ounces

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Speaker 1: of it a year. Compare that to ten ms for

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Speaker 1: the average Swiss, which is twenty two pounds. It's a

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Speaker 1: lot of chocolate. So that is our history of chocolate.

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Speaker 1: But I'm sure there are some little tidbits that we

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Speaker 1: have missed. So if you have a little bit of

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Speaker 1: chocolate history you'd like to tell us, email us at

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Speaker 1: History podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also

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Speaker 1: on Twitter at missed in History, and we have a

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Speaker 1: Facebook fan page where we like to be able to

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Speaker 1: interact with all of you. And if you're looking for

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Speaker 1: a little more about the technical process of chocolate being

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Speaker 1: made with pictures, oh plus pictures, which is always good,

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Speaker 1: you can search for how Chocolate Works on our homepage

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Speaker 1: at www dot how stuff works dot com. For more

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Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff

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Speaker 1: works dot com and be sure to check out the

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Speaker 1: stuff you missed in the History Glass blog on the

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com home page. Three