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

a consensus that chocolate should always be taken in moderation and that the effect on the body depended to a large extent on the ingredients and method of preparation, although some writers continued to claim that it was always unhealthy while others regarded it more or less as a panacea. We might observe that categorical advice on healthy eating appears surprisingly elusive.

In several ways, then, modern associations with chocolate can be traced back to the establishment of Spanish colonies in South America. Chocolate, although widely available, connotes women’s greed and laziness. While it contains some ‘healthy’ elements, there is widespread anxiety about the undesirable ways over-indulgence might affect the body. Chocolate also took on another set of meanings which still accompany every mouthful: both the end product and theraw ingredients depended on forced labour. The ‘dark history’ of sugar, a commodity which was to become inseparable from cacao, is well known, but the production of chocolate depended on the slavery of African labourers two hundred years before the horrors of the Middle Passage entered the European cultural imaginary. Chocolate had always been produced by the poor and consumed by the rich, and chocolate consumers had often lived thousands of miles from the main sites of production in Mesoamerica, but what was new in the seventeenth century was the reliance on an inter-continental slave trade.

Cacao was first grown as a crop, rather than gathered from managed plantations, in the Portuguese settlement of Bahia on the Atlantic coast of Brazil in the seventeenth century. The beans had previously been harvested by Native American groups under the direction of Jesuit missionaries, but with growing demand from the Spanish colonies to the north (the Portuguese in South America never became habitual chocolate consumers) it was apparent that a more intensive system would be profitable. Using the native Tupi as forced labour to gather forastero beans in the rainforest was almost impossible because the Tupi knew the land a great deal better than the missionaries and, since the work was unsupervised, had no difficulty in leaving as and when they wished. The difficulties of working on an industrial scale in the rainforest became overwhelming. Prefiguring the establishment of the sugar and tobacco trades in the following century, the Jesuits switched to managed plantations that were serviced almost entirely by slaves from the Portuguese colonies in West Africa. The enduring advantage of cacao rather than sugar or tobacco in this context was that the processes involved were so complicated as to provide work for children, women in advanced pregnancy and the elderly as well as the strongadults needed for heavy work in the fields. Cacao facilitated the use (abuse) of slave labourers from cradle, or at least toddlerhood, to grave. As the market expanded with the European acquisition of the taste for chocolate, a number calculated at ‘nearly ten percent of the volume of the whole transatlantic slave trade’ went to work on the cacao plantations in Brazil.

2The Chocolate House

Chocolate entered Europe through Spain late in the sixteenth century. For chocolate to make this transatlantic passage, there had to be consumers in Spain who knew that they wanted it, and in this light the lapse of seventy years between the first European encounter with cacao and the presence of chocolate drinks in monasteries and at the court of King Philip II is not surprising. Monks and merchants had to travel to the New World, remain there long enough to acquire a taste for new commodities, and return to Spain for long enough to introduce these commodities to their social networks. Monastic orders provided networks which reached across the Atlantic but also across Europe, and the Jesuits and Dominicans were initially responsible for the dissemination of chocolate in the Old World.

The first records of cocoa in Europe portray a substance of value only because it was exotic, a curiosity from the New World that came in a literal package with striking feathers from strange birds and copal incense. A group of Kekchi Maya nobles brought to the Spanish court by Dominican missionaries brought prepared chocolate as part of their official offering, and when representatives of the religious orders in South America attended convocations in Europe, theytook with them ‘great wealth and gifts to the Generalls, to the Popes and Cardinals and Nobles in Spain, as bribes to facilitate whatsoever just or unjust, right or wrong they are to demand.’2 By the first decades of the seventeenth century, chocolate and the paraphernalia used in its consumption in the Spanish American colonies were regularly included in transatlantic shipments of goods, albeit in quantities suggesting private consumption among the elite rather than the development of a metropolitan Spanish market.

Chocolate was consumed in Europe in much the same form as in Mesoamerica for at least the first half of the seventeenth century. The traditional chocolate spices, vanilla, chilli, the colourant annatto and ‘ear flowers’ (Cymbopetalum penduliflorum) were all imported with the cacao, which usually came in its solid, processed form. As several still lifes from the period demonstrate, chocolate drinkers in Spain used thejicara, a laminated gourd used as a chocolate cup in pre-Conquest Tenochtitlan, or the clay tecomate, as drinking vessels. The foam on the top of the drink was valued as much by Spanish consumers as it had been by the Aztecs or indeed the Maya, and the practice of making it with a whisk called a molinillo rather than by pouring from a height went back at least to the first years of the colony.

Chocolate cup, Petit Palais Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

Women grinding cocoa, from E. G. Squier’s Nicaragua, 1852.

As years passed and chocolate became more widespread in Spain and then Italy, substitutions were made by those who could not find or afford the authentic seasonings or impedimenta. The honey used for sweetening in Mesoamerica would sometimes be replaced with sugar, and more readily available spices from the Middle East such as pepper and cinnamon began to take the place of chilli.