Q – When was the
first chocolate bar created?
Was it: 1649, 1749, 1849 or 1949?
Answer at the end of this post!
In last week’s post about the awesome chocolate kitchen at
Hampton Court Palace, we were introduced to Thomas Tosier – chocolatier to King
George I. But the story doesn’t end there as Thomas had an enterprising wife,
Grace Tosier, who was something of a phenomena in her own rite.
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| Grace Tosier with her trade mark wide brimmed hat and posy of flowers at her bosom. |
Grace seems a larger than life character. A portrait of her
exists which shows a jolly looking woman wearing the trade mark large brimmed
hat and a posy of flowers in her bosom. Whilst her husband worked for the king at Hampton Court Palace, she ran a successful
chocolate house in Greenwich.
In the 18th century chocolate houses were a bye
word amongst the upper classes for luxury, sophistication and good company. Grace
was canny enough to recognize that when it came to cocoa and Tosier’s links to
the king, their surname was a brand to be reckoned with. Indeed, when her
husband died and eventually she remarried, she valued it enough to retain the
name Grace Tosier.
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| The chocolate kitchen at Hampton Court Palace - it was here that the actual cup of hot chocolate was created. |
Grace’s story is interwoven with the history of chocolate.
Historically, the invention of chocolate bars is relatively recent, and for two
thousand years cocoa was consumed as a beverage. The practice first took place in
Mexico, when the court of Montezuma, king of the Aztecs, consumed a
post-prandial chalice of chocolate which was decanted from one vessel to
another until it gained a frothy head.
To create the beverage the sun-dried, roasted in earthen
pots, the shells removed and the kernels ground over a fire. The heat turned
the powder to a paste, the flavouring added and the mix formed into cakes which
was left on banana leaves to dry ready for storage. To make the drinking
chocolate the cakes were crumbled into water, heated and whipped up.
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| Cocoa pods and beans. The cocoa harvest was considered unreliable and so the plants were grown beneath banana trees for a second revenue stream. |
The Aztecs gave chocolate to warriors in blocks coloured
with annatto, a red dye, which stained the lips and tongue in symbolism of
human blood (the Aztecs and Mayans had a penchant for human sacrifice!)
“The lips and part of
the face around them, are covered with the foam, and when it has been coloured
with annatoo it looks horrific because it is just like blood.”
Gonzalez de Oviedo, writing in the 16th century.
For a long period the Spanish kept hot chocolate secret with
such success that when in 1579 British buccaneers stopped a Spanish ship, they
tipped the cargo of cocoa beans overboard as worthless. But by 1660 the
Europeans had cottoned on to what they were missing and drinking chocolate
became hugely popular.
Books of recipes appeared as early as 1609, as people
experimented with ideas such as replacing cornmeal as a thickener, with ground
almonds. The Aztec frothiness was mimicked by using a special swizzle stick, or
molinillo, and indeed later chocolate pots can be told apart from coffee pots
by the hole in the lid through which the molinillo was inserted.
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| Hot chocolate pots on display at the chocolate kitchens at Hampton Court Palace |
In the mid 17th century via a succession of royal
marriages chocolate drinking crossed through Spain, Portugal, Italy, France on
its way to England. The drink was sold in chocolate shops which were an
environment for the wealthy to discuss business and some gained reputations for
being breeding grounds for radical politics. In 1675 King Charles II felt so
threatened by the hotbed of chocolate houses that for a short time he closed
them down. One can imagine the uproar of the public being deprived of chocolate
– and they soon reopened.
And finally, the answer to the teaser question:
Q – When was the
first chocolate bar created?
Was it: 1649, 1749, 1849 or 1949?
Answer at the end of this post!
A – 1849
The first
chocolate bars were not announced with a fanfare, but created as a means of
using up waste products left over from the manufacture of cocoa powder for hot
chocolate drinks.
