History Of Chocolate

The earliest record of chocolate was more than fifteen hundred years ago in the Central American rainforests. The Cacao tree was worshipped by the Mayan civilisation who believed it to be of divine origin.

The Aztecs regarded chocolate as an aphrodisiac and their emperor, Montezuma, drank it fifty times a day
Chocolate was brought to Europe by Cortez in the 1500's.

The first chocolate factories opened in Spain, where the dried fermented beans were brought back from the new world by the Spanish treasure fleets. It arrived in England in about 1520 and the first chocolate house opened in London in 1657, followed rapidly by many others.

The first mention of chocolate in solid form was when bakers started adding cocoa powder to cakes in the mid 1600's
In 1828 a Dutch chemist, Johannes Van Houten, invented a method of extracting the bitter tasting ‘cocoa butter’ from the roasted beans. Chocolate, in the form we now recognise, first appeared in 1847 when Fry & Sons of Bristol, mixed sugar with cocoa powder and cocoa butter to produce the first solid chocolate bar.

In 1875 a Swiss manufacturer, Daniel Peters, found a way to combine cocoa powder and cocoa butter with sugar and dried milk powder to produce the first milk chocolate.