Who Invented Chocolate

An article by Sam Reese    Comments Off

Chocolate is a type of food that is usually sold as a sweet, dessert, or in drink form, and is processed from the Cacao bean which is native to South America. The cacao bean is actually considered a vegetable and the pulp within the fruit is edible, thought the seed inside the fruit needs to be roasted before it can be used to make chocolate.

Indian people from South America have used the pulp of the cacao fruit for thousands of years to make an alcoholic drink, while the beans were roasted and ground to make a hot drink that would be served at religious ceremonies. Around 1500 BC people from Puerto Escondido, an ancient ruin in Honduras, were storing ground cacao beans in pottery jars that archeologists believe were used by the upper strata of society for important events.

Mayan and Aztec people believed the cacao tree had been given to them by the gods, in fact Aztec legend was that the god Quetzalcoatl brought the cacao from the heavens to the sacred gardens of the Aztec priests. The chocolate bean became so valuable that it was used as a form of currency by South American indians, and was given the name black gold by Spanish conquistadors who introduced chocolate to Europe.

Until the 1870s chocolate in Europe and North America was simply a beverage, and would often be mixed with spices to improve the taste. The man most responsible for inventing chocolate that could be eaten was a Swiss man named Daniel Peter, whose candle factory was going bankrupt due to the popularity of oil lamps. Peter married a local chocolate maker’s daughter and set about producing a solid chocolate that could be eaten.

His next door neighbor, Henri Nestlé had just perfected the recipe for powdered milk and the two collaborated to produce solid chocolate. By a strange quirk of fate, Daniel Peter’s original chocolate company was bought by his North American distributors, Lamont, Corliss and Company in 1908, which was in turn bought by Nestlé in 1951 and then changed name to Nestlé Chocolates.

Rodolph Lindt, another chocolate maker liked Peter’s recipe so much he invented a process in 1879 for making even smoother chocolate that would melt in the mouth, which was soon copied by every other major chocolate producer on both sides of the Atlantic. Filled chocolates finally became available in 1913 when another Swissman invented the moulds and a quick setting recipe.