American Nectar: Chocolate In The Time Of Love

Smooth, sweet, and rich. Those are some of the words we might conjure up when describing our favorite chocolate. When we think of chocolate, we dream of foil-wrapped Dove hearts, tubes of Toblerone, or maybe a melty Hershey’s bar sandwiched between graham crackers and a marshmallow. With a sweet holiday coming up in just a few weeks, Americans alone are estimated to purchase 58 million pounds of the cacao confection in the next few weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. 

While we may love chocolate whatever its form, for the majority of its history, chocolate was actually a drink. Since today is National Drinking Chocolate Day, seems like a tour back to its origins would be in order. 

Most of us are familiar with what we call hot chocolate; the sweet, hot drink made out of cocoa powder, sugar, and milk. However, the original “drinking” chocolate was a bitter concoction, more reminiscent of coffee. 

First cultivated in South America, kawkaw was known for thousands of years and probably consumed by the Olmecs before being prized by the Mayans and Aztecs. The cacao beans were so valuable they were used as currency, and mixed with a plethora of other ingredients that would be unfamiliar to us today: ground corn, dyed red with annatto, and poured cup-to-cup to create a foam on top of the hot beverage. 

So where did the journey from hot, bitter concoction with ritual significance to a cozy, sweet drink for children and ice skaters in hallmark movies begin?

Early Spanish marauders into South America tried their first sips of the drink called xocolatl (or chocol ha to the Mayans) and they were not impressed. A priest even described the taste of the hot chocolate as reminiscent of feces, while an Italian traveler claimed it was only good for feeding animals. 

No one knows exactly when the mania for chocolate hit Europe, or what overcame their initial distaste for the dark drink (and drink it was: chocolate wasn’t made into a confectionary treat until hundreds of years after the bean made it to Europe). Perhaps it was years of diplomatic meetings with South American rulers, priests who gained a taste for it in their trips, or just the plain addictive quality of caffeine. Our modern source of caffeine, coffee, wouldn’t arrive in Europe for nearly a hundred more years. 

Whatever the appeal, Spain started importing the bean for drinking towards the end of the 16th century. Houses for drinking chocolate started springing up, and the drink became a European obsession. So much so, that when William Hughes, British “buccaneer” turned botanist dropped his hot take on chocolate, calling it the “American Nectar,” his audience knew what he was referring to. 

Still, the “American Nectar” was very much an acquired taste. The cacao bean was fermented, dried, and ground and hot water was added. The cocoa butter in the beans made it oily and bitter, and even the sweetening with honey or sugar wouldn’t bring it to what we enjoy today. There were several important steps on the way. 

Sometime in the 1700s, a British physician spent some time in Jamaica and learned a way to make chocolate that made it more palatable-mixing it with milk. Most people agreed, and milk became a key ingredient in drinking chocolate. Even Thomas Jefferson was a fan. Of chocolate he said “the superiority of the article both for health and nourishment will soon give it the same preference over tea & coffee in America which it has in Spain.” While he was wrong about that (according to Dunkin, America runs on their coffee), another advancement in cacao production would make something that Americans really would fall in love with-the chocolate bar. 

In 1828, Coenraad Johannes van Houten created something that would change the world of chocolate forever: the cocoa press. By separating the cocoa butter from the beans, they were able to create a shelf stable powder that mixed easily with sugar and milk to create the delicious hot cocoa that we love today. The separation of the cocoa butter also would be important for another invention that would pop up in 1847-the chocolate bar-but that’s a story for another time. 

Due to the way chocolate is processed today, you can’t make a true Mesoamerican drinking chocolate with grocery store ingredients (and it probably wouldn’t appeal much to the modern palate). I tried several more or less historically accurate recipes, and to be honest I hated them. Hundreds of years of innovation and market research have made (in my opinion) a HUGE improvement in the world of chocolate. In spite of Jefferson’s opinion, I will keep my daily coffee and let  the chocolate be reserved for Kit Kat bars and snowy nights. Still, if you would like to try a chocolatey beverage with a nod to it’s traditionally origins, you can try this one:

3 T. Brown sugar

Pinch of crushed red pepper flakes

6 bars of raw cacao paste, chopped 

¼ cup Trader Joe’s semi-sweet chocolate chunks

2 T. Cocoa powder

½ T. Vanilla extract

Over medium low heat, toast brown sugar with red pepper flakes until melted. Add cacao paste, cocoa powder and chocolate chunks, and stir till incorporated. Stir in vanilla and remove from heat. Cool and froth by pouring back and forth into a waiting mug. 

Pair with the informative podcast on the history of chocolate by You’re Dead To Me, and sip while you take a delightful (and delicious) trip down the history of the evolution of a treat loved by kings and children alike.