We cannot imagine our life without chocolate, isn’t it? So why don’t we learn about the history of chocolate.
Until 16th century, chocolate was only existed in the region called Mesoamerica. Back in 1900 BCE, the people of that area had educated to cook beans of the native cacao tree. Then they used to ground the beans and they were mixed up with cornmeal and some chili peppers to make it able to drink. It did not serve them a relaxing cup of hot cocoa, but a bitter, strong, healthy mixture frothing with foam.
Cacao beans were also used as currency by Aztecs and had chocolate at royal banquets, it was also given to soldiers as a reward for success in war.
The first transatlantic chocolate encountered in 1519 when Hernán Cortés frequented the court located Tenochtitlan. As recoreded by Cortés's deputy, the king offered 50 jugs of the drink into golden cups. Then Missionaries' salacious gave it as an aphrodisiac to the colonists. At the beginning stage, it has bitter taste produced it suitable as a medicine for illness, like stomachs upsets with sweetening things added as honey, sugar, or vanilla. This quickly turned out chocolate a popular exquisiteness in the Spanish court. Soon after no aristocratic dishes was done without amazing chocolate ware.
The sophisticated drink was not easy and time consuming to prepare in big amounts. That included using plantations and requires more labour. But this was accomplished by the invention of cocos press by Coenraad van Houten in 1828. This invention could segregate the cocoa’s butter left with a powered that could be used to mix in to a unpolluted solution .Soon after , a Swiss man named Daniel Peter included powdered milk to the mix to create milk chocolate. By the 20th century, people stopped considering chocolate as an elite luxury, yet it had become a normal treat.
Chocolate doesn’t only have sweet taste, yet it had a cruel history too. To meet massive demands of chocolate, they require more crops of cocoas for cultivation that is only suitable near the equator. So instead of Africans slaves imported to South America, Cocoas production itself was shifted to West Africa. But during the growth of the industry, there have been many dreadful abuses in many plantations. This effected children as a child labour with an estimated value of 2,000,000 inspite of efforts from large scale chocolate companies.
However, chocolate had created itself an inevitable item in many customs of our modern culture.
