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For many people chocolate is the last word in enjoyment and luxury. What place does it have in your life? When Linnaeus systematised the natural world, he called the genus that includes the cocoa tree Theobroma, the food of the gods. Eating chocolate is perhaps the most pleasurable sensory experience in food. One churnalistic story a few years back claimed that people gain more satisfaction from eating it than from "passionate kissing". People who insist they crave it because of its jittery caffeine, its weedy cannabinoids, its stimulant theobromine, are wrong. Give someone a tasteless capsule containing chocolate and their desire won't be sated. It's the physical sensation of eating chocolate, the solid slick across the tongue, the smooth and delicate mingling of sugar and fat and that perfumed butteriness that truly appeal. But chocolate as we know it has only existed for a short time. For thousands of years it was exclusively a drink, a frothy concoction typically flavoured with spices or chilli. Chocolate derives from the seed pods of the cacao tree, sprouting in ridged, garish array direct from the trunk. Its flowers are pollinated by a midge. The tree evolved in equatorial south America, and Mesoamerican peoples were cultivating it 3,000 years ago. The pulp of the raw fruit is said to be delicious and can be fermented into a boozy drink, but extracting chocolate, which comes from the seeds themselves, has always a difficult and labour-intensive process. The raw seeds are bland and bitter, but if you dry them, roast them, ferment them and grind them they develop heady, complex fragrances. They have been valued by every civilisation that has encountered them, including our own. Chocolate often featured in the bloodthirsty rituals of the Aztecs and Mayans, who used the seeds as currency. Cortés realised the value of the "black almonds" around 1517, and though his men at first found the drink disgustingly bitter they quickly developed a taste for it. After he came home in 1527 he always kept a pot of chocolate on his desk. By the 1540s Spain was "trading" chocolate, which is to say stealing it, from its new acquisitions in central and south America, and over the years it exported the trees to its other colonies in the Caribbean. Chocolate took a long time to trickle through bellicose early modern Europe. The first Frenchman to drink it was Alphonse de Richelieu, brother of the cardinal, who hoped it might "moderate the vapours of his spleen". Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat writes that when the fashion for drinking chocolate reached Versailles in the 1670s, one marchioness ate so much that observers believed it caused her to "produce a baby as black as the Devil", neglecting the detail that the chocolate had been brought to her by a young and affectionate African slave. One morning in 1661 Samuel Pepys woke "with my head in a sad taking through the last night's drink", and took chocolate to settle his stomach. At that time chocolate was still relatively new to England and extremely expensive, subject like sugar to high import duties. But it grew inexorably in popularity: gentlemen's clubs often began as licentious and cocoa-sloshed meeting-places. White's started as White's Chocolate House, the Garrick as the somewhat periphrastic Cocoa Tree Chocolate House. Everything changed in 1828 when a Dutchman invented a press that removed most of the cocoa butter from the raw beans. This butter could then be added to ground beans to make a smooth paste which remained solid at room temperature but melted in the mouth – modern chocolate. As sugar prices fell and cheaper west African cocoa began to reach Europe, chocolate segued into the mass market. Many of the 19th-century English companies that made "block chocolate", as it was initially known, were owned by Quakers: the Frys, the Cadbury brothers, the Rowntrees, the Terrys. Forbidden to serve in the army or navy, excluded from the established church, the universities, medicine or practising law, they turned to trade, tweaking the British diet forever. By 1939 chocolate sales had overtaken those of sugar-based sweets, and have never lost their lead. The overall British chocolate market has flagged in recent years, though sales of dark chocolate continue to grow. The cheap stuff has struggled in part thanks to rising cocoa and sugar prices, but equally to the important campaign against obesity. The over-55s, who reportedly eat more chocolate than children, now help to maintain sales. Apart from Maltesers and the odd square of Swiss I've gone off milk chocolate in recent years. Even as a sugar-hungry child I found Mars bars sickly, and since adolescence I've rarely craved such a surge of soft, saccharine fat. But some people bear astonishing loyalty to specific brands. I often cook with Green and Black's, despite the fact that like Cadbury's it's owned, apparently with some chafing, by a company that make aerosol cheese. Though Kraft has maintained Green and Black's commitment to fair trade, its espousal of a movement set up in part to oppose it and other multinationals marks a tense and conflicted moment for fair trade - which had already been attracting criticism. Many ethically-minded consumers prefer to buy their chocolate from co-operatives like the Grenada Chocolate Company. Valrhona deserves its fame, and Paul A Young introduced me a while back to the ravishing Amedei – if you want truly superb chocolate, you can't do much better. I'm going to give the last word to Brillat-Savarin, the great French gastronome. This passage is taken from Pleasures of the Table, released as part of Penguin's superb recent Great Food series: "So let any man who has drunk too deeply of the cup of pleasure, or given to work a notable portion of the time which should belong to sleep; who finds his wit temporarily losing its edge, the atmosphere humid, time dragging, the air hard to breathe, or who is tortured by a fixed idea which robs him of all freedom of thought; let such a man administer to himself a good pint of ambered chocolate ... and he will see wonders."
Oliver Thring
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