Chocolate Was a Bitter Drink for 3,000 Years

Cacao residues in pottery from the Olmec heartland push the human relationship with chocolate back to at least 1900 BCE. For the next three thousand years, almost everyone who drank it drank it bitter. Maya and Aztec preparations whipped roasted, ground cacao beans with water, chili, achiote, and sometimes maize, then poured the mixture from height to raise a thick foam. Sugar had no part in it.

Spanish colonists carried cacao back to Europe in the 1500s, where it stayed a hot, slightly thickened drink — sweetened now with cane sugar — for another two centuries. Solid eating chocolate did not exist yet. The bean is roughly half cocoa butter by weight, and that fat resists clean separation; without a press, the resulting paste is gritty and greasy.

Coenraad Van Houten changed that in 1828. The Dutch chemist patented a hydraulic press that squeezed most of the cocoa butter out of the roasted bean, leaving a defatted cake that ground into a fine, soluble powder. He also treated the powder with alkali — Dutch processing — to soften the bitterness. With clean cocoa butter on one side and dry powder on the other, you finally had the building blocks of a bar.

Fry & Sons in Bristol used Van Houten's outputs to mold the first solid eating chocolate in 1847. Daniel Peter in Vevey added powdered milk in 1875, after years of failed attempts foiled by water content; he eventually cracked it using the condensed milk Henri Nestlé was making next door.

The sweet snap of a milk-chocolate bar is younger than the steam locomotive. The drink is older than the wheel.