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

back into men when they encountered civilian populations, serving as paternal peace offerings to children and often more loaded gifts to women.

American GIS in Normandy distributing chocolate to children, June 1944.

Cadbury’s advertisement: solid chocolate as a treat for middle-class children.

‘Whitening’ Chocolate –

Bourgeois Domestication

As we have seen, chocolate had been associated with women from the conquest of South America onwards, but in the early nineteenth century this association occurs in a new context. Far from the black magic wrought in the back streets of seventeenth-century South American cities, Victorian chocolate is linked to a thoroughly domestic idea of femininity primarily justified and fulfilled by motherhood. The ideology of the bourgeois family was central to nineteenth-century Europe, and chocolate, as ever, found its place at the era’s heart. The new, and recognizably modern, advertisements of the Victorian era show how chocolate producers were able to exploit the simultaneous development of manufacturing processes, branding and the nuclear family.

Unlike the ‘conversation pieces’ of the eighteenth century, which show chocolate as an aristocratic accessory, nineteenth century images of chocolate in the home are cosy and emphatically middle-class. Chocolate is not a luxury associated with sensual indulgence but healthy nourishment for growing families, what caring mothers provide for their children. The link between chocolate and childhood strengthened through the nineteenth century. Chocolate adverts from the middle of the century onwards were filled with pictures of frolicking, often chubby and cherub-faced children. The motif of happy families, with a direct appeal to mothers as the source of this happiness (as well as the supplier of cocoa), became an important component in marketing chocolate. In its new guise as nutritious food, chocolate adverts mustered images that were of maternal and/or nurturing femininity, as in Dutch manufacturer Droste’s now-famous cocoa label featuring a nurse, introduced around the turn of the century.

Fry’s chocolate advertisement, 1920s.

Chocolate as mother’s milk: Helm cocoa advertisement, c. 1900.

The rise of the chocolate box in the same period provides some famous illustrations of this new identification with bourgeois domesticity. Like so many other developments in the creation of familiar forms of chocolate, the development of bite-sized filled chocolates arranged in a box that is at least as important to the purchase as the contents resulted from the combination of new technologies and broader social change. Cadbury’s put the first box of chocolates on the market in 1868, shortly after importing their Van Houten press and increasing production. It was also in the 1860s that the first factory-produced greeting cards were sold, featuring similar images to those used to decorate the earliest chocolate boxes. The boxes were designed to outlast the contents and they were often used as long-term repositories for small objects of emotional value, particularly letters, as if the chocolates were both representing and marking the place of future tokens of love. It is easy to see how, in this context, the taste and ingredients of the chocolate could become secondary to the symbolism of the packaging, which, then as now, offered a simulacrum of the jewellery box to which it might be a forerunner. In the early years of the twentieth century and especially after the First World War, chocolate packaging proliferated. Decorated tins were cheaper to produce thandecorated boxes, as well as being more durable. Tins of Quality Street, which are still a feature of a great many British Christmas gatherings, were first produced in 1936, with both the name and the figures on the tin taken from a typically nostalgic play by J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.

Britain was not the only place where the development of a manufacturing process for producing chocolate products went hand-in-hand with key packaging and marketing developments. In 1912 the Brussels chocolatier Jean Neuhaus (notably the grandson of a confectioner from Switzerland) developed a technique for making a hard chocolate shell for making filled chocolates or pralines. The name ‘praline’, referring to filled chocolates, sometimes generates confusion, particularly in the anglophone world. Especially in North America, the word also refers to a confection of nuts (normally pecans) and caramel, and is furthermore similar to the term ‘praliné’, which now refers to a specific type of nut and sugar (and sometimes chocolate) confection often used as a filling in chocolates. All of these words derive from the name of the seventeenth-century French Maréchal du PlessisPraslin, whose cook purportedly invented the sugar-coated nuts. In a time of rapidly evolving confections and rising standards of living, the new filled chocolates rapidly caught on as a refined and elegant treat, and the word itself spread into German and Dutch as a synonym not for sugar and nuts but chocolate confections. Such filled chocolates soon spread beyond Neuhaus and became a trademark of Belgian confectionery more generally. The firms Leonidas (founded by a Greek-born American in 1910) and Godiva (established in 1926, now owned by a Turkish company) followed suit, also specializing in filled chocolates. Today, specialist manufacturers use the form to experiment with ever more exotic fillings and flavours such as black pepper and tamarind.

Godiva chocolates.

Unlike Cadbury’s heavily decorated and reusable chocolate box, Neuhaus took a different tack in packaging their new creations. In 1915 Neuhaus’s wife Louise Agostini, a ballerina by training, replaced the paper cones in which pralines were originally sold with a one-piece, hand-folded box, the ballotin. The ballotin was never patented and soon became, as it remains, a widely recognized sign of superior chocolates, which were particularly associated with Belgium partly because of the success of the Neuhaus firm. These elegant but flimsy cardboard boxes have promised high quality, ‘hand made’ chocolate for nearly a century, while hinged tins which last for decades are associated with inferior, mass-produced candy. For post-industrial consumers, elitism can be proved by a preference for form over function, but there is also a tendency to prize what is, or appears to be, artisanal and ‘hand-crafted’ over what is obviously the result of a mechanized process. Cheap chocolates which