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

come in tins and bear the stamp of the machines that made them, perhaps in theform of animals or flowers, also come with descriptions which make no reference to the manufacturing process. Quality Streets include ‘orange-flavoured truffle with orange crunchy pieces’ and ‘soft toffee finger dipped in milk chocolate’, while even the newly repackaged Black Magic, intended to profit from a perceived vogue for the ‘dark’ chocolate which has always been a minority (and elite) taste in the UK, limits itself to ‘dark chocolate wrapped around smooth praline with chopped roasted hazelnuts’. By contrast, Neuhaus’s ‘Caprice’ ‘harbours an incredibly crunchy nougatine. A subtle mix of caramelised sugar and hazelnuts that melts in the mouth, is folded and filled by hand before being immersed in a chocolate dip.’ Montezuma’s, an artisanal British chocolatier, assures buyers that, ‘Each and every truffle is handmade by our skilled chocolatiers who pass all that pride and passion into great chocolate.’ The more expensive and ‘better’ the chocolates, the more they have been handled, folded, immersed, filled and generally fondled. The cheap stuff pops unashamedly from a machine, like bullets.

Origins are back: Montezuma chocolate bar.

These multiplying forms and packages for chocolate in the nineteenth century were associated with maternity, domesticity and romantic love – but only for the middle and upper classes. Discussion of chocolate became decidedly paternalistic when aimed at the working classes. Solid chocolates were treats for middle- and upper-class women and children, but for working-class families, cocoa became an equivalent to soup – warm, ‘nourishing’ and cheap. In discussions of chocolate’s benefits to the working classes, its metaphorical and/or material association with milk – a pure and healthy substitute for solid food – gained new emphasis. Chocolate had long been drunk as a nourishing food substitute among the poorer classes in South America (and was a sanctioned way of ‘cheating’ on Catholic fast days among most classes), and as it became more affordable in Europe, such uses were similarly encouraged. Like sugar, which was similarly promoted to the working classes, chocolate appeared as abstract food – pure calories to fuel working bodies. Certainly the association of chocolate drinking with languor and idleness had vanished by the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, it was considered something that would boost industry and production. A 1906 treatise claimed: ‘Cacao is the most nourishing of all drinks, it is almost without exception the cheapest food that we can put together. One could call it meat and drink. If only the poorly-nourished working man and the overworked factory child could be put in a position to use it instead of that brew they call coffee and tea, they would benefit from it in all respects.’ Ofcourse the ruling classes would also benefit if workers would adopt this apparent miracle food to keep them working rather than demanding things like, say, increases in their material means or better conditions for children in factories. Chocolate’s stimulating properties, which the same book credited as greater than coffee’s but less than tea’s (!) were also mentioned in this regard. (This was measured by pure amounts of caffeine, teeine and theobromine, respectively, under the erroneous assumption that they all have the same effect.) Chocolate was not only thought of as a replacement for food, but particularly among the temperance-minded (who included the owners of a number of chocolate factories), it had long been seen as a wholesome replacement for drink. Not only would it keep the factories running, chocolate would thus also counteract the disorderly proclivities of the lower classes.

Cocoa as fuel for manly work: a Cadbury’s advert from around 1900. Note the working-class habit of drinking from the saucer.

The identification of chocolate as fuel for ‘manly’ work contained another irony within the chocolate industry. While bourgeois women and children became the most visible consumers of chocolate, with increasing mechanization, and thus decreasing levels of heavy physical labour involved in processing, women and children also began to make up larger and larger proportions of the labour force manufacturing chocolate. By the turn of the century, the majority of those working in chocolate factories in France, Britain and Germany were women, and to a lesser extent children. A 1920 treatise describes how most of the steps in making chocolate cremes are undertaken by men, but assures readers that ‘the covering of cremes and the packing of the finished chocolates into boxes are performed by girls. Covering is light work requiring a delicate touch, and if, as is usual, it is done in bright airy rooms, is a pleasant occupation.’ The description of paid factory labour is made here to sound much more like the pastimes of more well-to-do women like needlework or other decorative hobbies, taking place in an aesthetically pleasing, almost domestic, environment. Many of the larger companies were well-known for their paternalistic care of their employees –women employees of Cadbury’s are apparently still issued a Bible and a red carnation upon their wedding day – though at least by the twentieth century, the need to employ married women remained a continual contradiction of the ideal of the domestic housewife that companies such as Rowntree’s sought to promote externally.

Paternalistic contradictions aside, many nineteenth-century firms did indeed see their factories as places to improve manufacturing processes and products but also the lives of their workers as well. In Britain it is particularly noteworthy that all of the chocolate firms that grew to prominence in the nineteenth century were owned by Quakers. Fry’s in Bristol, Cadbury’s in Bournville (near Birmingham) and Rowntree’s in York each owned model factories which supplied housing and access to education to many of their workers. In addition, many of them did work actively – if not always successfully– to combat the slave trade. Of Mennonite rather than Quaker heritage, Milton Hershey perhaps took the role of philanthropic capitalist to its greatest extreme at his business in the ‘Quaker State’. In the years after he bought the equipment from the Chicago Exposition, Hershey did not merely