Chocolate by Sarah Moss (ebook voice reader .TXT) 📕

because, like the other commodities, it signifies class. De Sade requires his wife to send him the trappings of aristocratic life in lateeighteenth-century France, to prove her enduring loyalty despite his disgrace and so he can prove that, regardless of the convictions for rape, sodomy and assault and the growing certainty of a life of incarceration, he is still a Marquis of the ancien régime.

De Sade is an extreme case, but the association of chocolate with the personal and political sins of the aristocracy in the late eighteenth century is strong. The beginning of Frances Burney’s second novel, Cecilia, establishes the heroine’s status as ‘heiress to an estate of 3000 pounds per annum’, ‘the accumulating possessions of a rising and prosperous family’. Since we meet Cecilia at the breakfast given to mark her departure from her childhood home, the first chapter has to work hard and fast to equip the heroine with all she requires to remain aristocratic in the reader’s mind through the hundreds of pages of tribulations that follow. Chocolate forms part of this shorthand, as the foolish Mr Morrice ‘studious to recommend himself’ to the wealthy orphan and ‘indifferent by what means’, ‘eagerly offered to assist her with cakes, chocolate, or whatever the table afforded’. In Jane Austen’s novels of upper middle-class life it is only the very rich and autocratic General Tilney who drinks chocolate, while Caroline Austen’s reminiscences of life at Steventon Rectory suggest the correct estimate of chocolate. Looking back from the 1870s, Caroline remembers her sister Anna’s wedding:

The breakfast was such as the best breakfasts then were: some variety of bread, hot rolls, buttered toast, tongue or ham and eggs. The addition of chocolate at one end of the table, and the wedding cake in the middle, marked the specialty of the day.5

And after that, the bride and groom set off for their new home. Chocolate and wedding cake, neither of which were to be consumed without proper reason, were enough to mark the occasion without vulgarity.

At the same time as art and literature in northern Europe presented chocolate as an integral part of aristocratic life, associated at least as fully with its vices as with its virtues, there were two developments towards the democratization of chocolate which would characterize its nineteenth century history. Chocolate production began to be mechanized and chocolate re-crossed the Atlantic, beginning to be consumed and then produced in North America.

Francois Boucher, The Breakfast, 1739.

Most of the cocoa consumed in Europe was ground by hand, possibly until as late as the nineteenth century, although a watermill had been used for cocoa in 1729. In cities across Europe, chocolate grinders carried their metates, not significantly different from those used by the Maya, from one house to another, kneeling to grind the roasted beans with stone rollers. It was work particularly associated with Sephardic Jews, who suffered waves of persecution at the hands of the trade guilds that policed food production in Europe until the late eighteenth century. In 1761 Joseph Fry of Bristol expanded his chocolate sales following the purchase of a watermill, and three years later had a London warehouse and ‘a network of agents in fifty-three towns’. By the late 1770s there were water-powered chocolate workshops in several French towns, and at the end of the century eight German and Austrian cities claimed chocolate factories. Dutch producers, naturally, used windmills, while there was a mule-driven mill in Spain; the idea of using inanimate power to grind large quantities of grain or beans had long been familiar, and as soon as steam power was available, it was applied to cocoa beans as well as wheat.

It is in the context of these processes that it becomes possible to trace chocolate consumption in North America. Relatively little is known about cocoa in colonial North America, but it seems to have reached the colony mostly via import from Britain (although this seems highly unlikely given the obvious probability of overland trade with Central American producers). Cocoa shipments were very heavily taxed, which makes it probable that rather more chocolate enteredthe colony than was officially recorded. Despite high prices, coffee houses in Boston in the late seventeenth century served chocolate, and there are records of artisans and labourers possessing cocoa beans. Account books from mid-eighteenth-century shops show individual merchants ordering small supplies of cocoa from England, along with sugar, tea and coffee. There were metates in colonial America, but most consumers bought chocolate in blocks which, by the end of the eighteenth century, were manufactured in the East Coast cities. As in Britain, chocolate was supplied to soldiers as a portable and dense source of energy, and it was consumed by fighters on both sides during the American Revolution.

Early factory methods.

The first documented chocolate mill in North America began to turn in 1765, when John Hannan, an Irish emigrant chocolate maker, began to work on the Neponset River in Dorchester, Massachusetts (although given the presence of mills in most American towns in this era, it seems likely that some of them occasionally ground cocoa as well as grain). In 1779 John Hannan disappeared, having said that he was investigating cocoa suppliers in the West Indies, and the following year James Baker took over the business. Under his son, Edmund, trade expanded rapidly when imports from Europe collapsed during the ‘War of 1812’, and in 1824 James Baker’s grandson Walter took charge. Now owned by the Kraft corporation, Baker’s chocolate is still widely available in North America.

Despite the rise and rise of American chocolate cookery upon which Baker’s continues to depend, chocolate in America seems to have remained almost exclusively the basis of an expensive drink until the nineteenth century. Early American cookbooks make no use of chocolate as an ingredient, and there seems to be no parallel to the idea of chocolate as an aristocratic women’s luxury which kept European chocolate in its place until the technological advances of the nineteenth century replaced the spicy, bitter beverage with a