Chocolate history in England
Chocolate history in England
One more drink made its way into English mouths in the late seventeenth century. Like the others, it was dark and bitter; like the others, the raw materials for it would not grow in England. Slowly but inexorably it would win itself a place like no other in the English diet.
It came from the New World via Spain and Portugal, and was one of the first foods from the Americas ‘fill English hearts with joy. It was magic: the Aztecs believed that cacao seeds were the gift of Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom, and the seeds had so much value that they were used as a form of currency. Aztec chocolate was served as a bitter, frothy liquid, mixed with spices or corn puree. It was believed to have aphrodisiac powers and to give the drinker strength.
The Aztecs gave it to the victims they sacrificed to ease their pain.
Christopher Columbus encountered the cacao bean on his fourth voyage to the Americas in 1502, when he and his crew seized a large native canoe that proved to contain cacao beans. None of the men had any idea what they were, but Columbus took them back to Spain.
They made no impact, but in 1544 Spanish friars from Mexico introduced chocolate to the Spanish court – with the crucial addition of sugar.
Only the rich and royal could afford it. The drink was time-consuming to make, and its exotic ingredients – cacao, sugar and spices – had to be imported from faraway continents. The additions were vital to the flavour; the beans probably became mildewed and decomposed on the long voyage from the New World. All required large plantations with many slaves.
Cromwell’s forces seized the island of Jamaica from the Spaniards in 1655; cacao plantations were already flourishing there, and Jamaica became England’s main source. By 1657, one entrepreneur was advertising chocolate in an English news-paper. Mercurius Politicus of 12-23 June 1659 carried an advertisement:
‘Chocolate, an excellent West India drink, sold in Queens Head Alley, in Bishopsgate Street, by a Frenchman … It cures and preserves the body of many diseases.’
By the end of the Commonwealth in 1659, Thomas Rugge, a London diarist, was writing in his journal about coffee, chocolate and tea as new drinks in London, and referring to chocolate as a harty drink in every street. Charles I’s physician Henry Stubbe wrote The Indian Nectar in praise of it. Samuel Pepys loved chocolate and mentions it in his diary several times; on 6 January 1663, he says:
‘up, and Mr Creed brought a pot of chocolate ready-made for our morning draught. On 3 May 1664, he went by agreement to Mr Bland’s and there drank my morning draught in good chocolate, and … sent home for another’. He is clearly more enthusiastic than he is about tea.
The first known English recipe for chocolate appeared slightly earlier, in 1652, and called for sugar, long red pepper, cloves, aniseed, almonds, nuts, orange flower water and, of course, cacao: ‘The hotter it is drunk, the better it is’. Unaware of the Aztec custom of drinking it cool, the recipe said that being cold it may do harm.
As with coffee and tea, chocolate was thought to have medicinal value. It was considered nourishing for the sick as well as an aid to digestion and was believed to promote longevity, help lung ailments, energise the body, cure hangovers, suppress coughs and, as mentioned, stimulate the libido.
For that reason, the Virginia Almanac of 1770 cautioned women against it, warning the fair sex to be in a particular manner careful how they meddle with romances, chocolate, novels, and the like, especially in the spring, as those were all ‘inflamers’ and very dangerous.
During the eighteenth century there was a great increase in European consumption – and so, like tea and coffee, chocolate had duties imposed upon it. All chocolate, at this time made exclusively into drinking chocolate, had to be wrapped in stamped papers supplied by excise men and then sealed proving the tax had been paid. By 1800 the tax was two shillings in the pound on cocoa imported from the British colonies. So its use was restricted to the well-off and chocolate became a feature of the daily life of the smart set. The accounts of Abraham Dent, who kept a shop in Kirkby Stephen (then in the historic county of Westmorland), indicate that chocolate usage in the eighteenth century in the north of England was minimal. Between 1762 and 1765 tea appears often, coffee rarely and chocolate only once. The middle and lower classes had to wait until the twentieth century, when reductions in taxation, large-scale manufacturing, and improvements in processing and transport would finally enable them to enjoy chocolate.
Hans Sloane, Queen Anne’s physician, was the first person to try mixing chocolate with milk. This was a closely guarded secret remedy, later sold to an apothecary. The secret was eventually bought in 1824 by the Quaker Cadbury brothers, who successfully mass-marketed it.
Sloane had already made himself a considerable fortune, and invested some of it in cocoa plantations in Jamaica, where he had first observed its dramatic effects in reviving sickly babies.
In Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon one character comments that ‘A large dish of rather weak cocoa every evening agrees with me better than anything; but, the heroine notes, as he poured out this rather weak cocoa, that it came forth in a very fine, dark-coloured stream; and at the same moment, his sisters both crying out, “Oh, Arthur, you get your cocoa stronger and stronger every evening.” Eventually, chocolate became so strong that it was produced as a solid. In 1828, a Dutch chemist found a way to make powdered chocolate by removing about half the natural fat (cacao butter) from chocolate liquor, pulverising what remained and treating the mixture with alkaline salts to cut the bitter taste. His product became known as ‘Dutch cocoa, and it soon led to the creation of solid chocolate. By 1824 the cocoa issue, or CI, was instituted in the Royal Navy, and each man received his daily ration, a one-ounce block of chocolate along with his rum and limes. 46
Do all these drinks sound diverse? In reality, all of them consist of a strong and bitter substance mixed with sugar. All of them except gin are caffeine in liquid form.
But sugar – rather than the drinks that contained it – was viciously addictive, and destined to become the first mass-produced exotic necessity of a proletarian working class. Its power to deform and reshape dietary norms was extraordinary; everything from bread to drinks was dominated by its taste. Without sugar, the diet of the poor even today would mostly be a matter of flavourless bread and water.
Source ~ ‘English Food a People’s History’ by Diane Purkiss