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

Dutch Coenraad van Houten developed a process for using a hydraulic press to extract cocoa butter from chocolate liquor. Using this press, he was able to reduce the cocoa butter content of the liquor from 53 per cent to around 27 per cent, leaving a cake that could easily be powdered and sold for drinking. In addition, van Houten then took the additional step of adding alkaline salts (the process now known as ‘Dutching’, as it became standard practice first in Dutch cocoa manufacture), which improved the way the chocolate mixes with water, in addition to making its flavour milder and its colour darker.

Nearly every history of chocolate, not least the potted histories now put forward by chocolate manufacturers themselves, lists this 1828 event as a major turning point in chocolate history, and gives the impression that a revolution in form and mass production of chocolate took off soon after. This has more to do with our habits of telling history as a story of heroic inventors and technological transformations,however, than it does with the ways and forms of chocolate in the nineteenth century. Van Houten’s press did not come out of the blue: there had been experiments with cocoa butter presses since the late seventeenth century. What is more, while van Houten’s press eventually did play an important role in chocolate manufacture, its immediate impact, both on van Houten’s fortunes particularly and chocolate production generally, was negligible. For many years to come, even people in van Houten’s native Netherlands still prepared the drink from pressed bars of unsweetened, fully fatted chocolate and boiling water. In fact, more ‘traditional’ ways of preparing and consuming chocolate persisted in a number of places alongside the increasing number of new and now more familiar forms of chocolate that emerged over the course of the century.

Instead of looking at van Houten’s invention as a revolutionary event, looking at it in context provides a neat illustration of the actual state of chocolate production and consumption in Europe at the time. The main reason this supposed ‘revolution’ was mostly ignored at first is that there was very little use for the excess cocoa butter. At that point the only useful by-product of chocolate production was the shells. These were ground and used roasted as a cheap tea-like drink, which was consumed by lower classes in the Low Countries and Ireland (where it was known as ‘miserables’). The shells were also used for animal fodder or used illicitly as a filling agent in pressed chocolate to stretch the more expensive product. Extracting the cocoa butter was thus primarily a more efficient means of making the drink less fatty, but it did not generate any useful by-products.

Van Houten’s development was one part of a wave of mechanization and industrialization of chocolate production, in which not the Dutch but the French were at the forefront.Already in the early part of the century, a number of individual chocolate manufacturers in France were mechanizing chocolate production, adding machines to the processes of grinding. This was one area where van Houten’s press did have more immediate impact, but not in the way or place that one might expect. J. M. Lehmann of Dresden, who had helped van Houten develop his hydraulic press, went into business in 1834 specializing in cocoa processing machinery and soon became one of the leading manufacturers throughout Europe. British manufacturers Cadbury Brothers of Birmingham and J. S. Fry & Sons bought presses in 1860 and 1866 respectively. Furthermore, it was Lehmann’s machines that the American candy-maker Milton Snavely Hershey saw on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Once the exhibition closed, Hershey bought the machines and they became the cornerstone of his new chocolate business.

Finally, although van Houten’s press was not an immediate success, the fact that he was investing in chocolate production at a time when chocolate supposedly ‘suffered from an unfashionable image’ is also worthy of note. Clearly there was enduring demand for chocolate, ancien régime or insecurity of supply notwithstanding. The renowned French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825 that chocolate ‘had become completely ordinary’ in France, particularly after the blockades ended and ‘rid us of all those humbugs one was forced to taste, but which were no more chocolate than chicory is mocha.’ Indeed, Brillat-Savarin had nothing but praise for the substance, emphasizing particularly its healthy qualities:

It remained for time and experience, those two great masters, to show that chocolate prepared with care is as healthy as it is agreeable. That it is nourishing, easily digested, and is not so injurious to beauty as coffee is said to be. It is very suitable for those persons who are given to great mental toil, to professors and lawyers, especially to travellers. It also suits certain feeble stomachs, and has been thought most advantageous in chronic diseases. It is the last resource in ailments of the pylorus.

Brillat-Savarin’s descriptions of chocolate illustrate the new social structure in which chocolate was circulating. While he emphasizes the overall nutritious nature of chocolate, he also makes abundantly clear that its benefits are really only available to those who possess the skills to prepare it properly, and the bodily discipline to know when and how to take it. The renewed emphasis on the health benefits of chocolate seems to fit in well at a time when a taste for it was certainly widespread, but there was general uncertainty about the correct forms of preparation and consumption. This also highlights the ambiguous position between confection and medicine that chocolate would still occupy through much of the century.

For the first half of the century, then, the meanings and physical form of chocolate were shifting. In a number of local settings, confectioners and pastry-makers – in addition to pharmacists – were creating novelties they could sell, and chocolate was one of the ingredients that seemed to show promise. The innovations that slowly transformed chocolate took place not in the Netherlands, but first in Britain, then in Switzerland, much later