The True History of Chocolate

"First of all, it has a global sweep. It’s not just about the impact of chocolate upon London. It takes us right back to the days of the Aztecs, for whom chocolate was a substance of great importance, and spiritual resonance as well. We begin in the Aztec Empire, and we hear about the rituals of chocolate consumption. Then we have this rather harrowing story of the collision of these two civilisations, of the Spanish conquistadors going across and frankly just pulverising the Aztec Empire. Hernán Cortés is the conquistador in chief and he uses European, Machiavellian divide-and-rule tactics to take over this empire and bring it to its knees, even though they were massively outnumbered. You begin to get these curious reports, written by the Spanish, which are transcribed into the book, of this money that seemed to be growing on trees in the Aztec Empire. These were the cacao pods. They noted that the Aztecs were using these pods to barter with. It was a form of currency. But, more than that, they were eating and drinking it as well. It’s a bloody story, what happened to their empire. Ultimately a lot of its bounty is brought back to Europe. At first, people were highly suspicious of chocolate. One early conquistador said it seemed more a drink for pigs than humanity. That was for good reason because the way the Aztecs drank it was distinctly unpalatable to European tastes. They used to drink it at room temperature. It was mixed with chillies that were hotter than the furnaces of hell, and frequently it was mixed with the blood of sacrificial slaves. The Aztecs often get a bit of a bad press for all their sacrifices, but they genuinely believed that if they didn’t sacrifice a certain quotient of slaves each day to the sun god that that same sun would explode, presumably in anger. When the Europeans introduce it into their native continent, they make some modifications. They begin to serve it up warm, they boil it first and mix it with some herbs and spices that give it a more comforting feel, like cinnamon and vanilla. Not that these are native to the Old World, but they were known to Europeans. Sometimes they used sugar as well, though not often. It becomes a big hit in Baroque Europe. First of all in Spain. It is a symbol of dominion as well as a manifestation of conspicuous consumption. It percolates through Europe. It reaches Italy, where you have a gluttonous chocoholic tyrant called Cosimo de Medici who used to import the finest ingredients for his chocolate whilst lecturing his subjects on the virtues of austerity. The way he drank it was so elaborate it was actually a state secret. No-one could reveal it on pain of death. It’s not a state secret anymore so I can reveal it without being garrotted. He drank it with musk perfume in it, and ambergris, which was one of the most expensive substances on earth. Apparently Charles V — the Habsburg Emperor — was nonplussed by chocolate and completely underwhelmed by it. He was much more excited by the bouncy rubber balls they brought back from America because no-one had ever seen them before. There was this craze of people bouncing them. But eventually it does gain some traction in the monasteries and palaces and courts of Catholic Europe. And at gruesome events. If you went to an auto-da-fé — of the type so memorably evoked by Voltaire in Candide — the nobles were all given a nice thick bowl of chocolate and a biscuit to dip into it as they watched a man’s flesh being burnt from his bone because he’d been sentenced to death by the Inquisition. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter All these countries trade with each other so it’s only a matter of time before it reaches London. This book tells a series of fantastic stories about the decadence of chocolate houses, especially in the aristocratic quarter of St James’s, which is where most of the bona fide chocolate houses were and how, unlike coffee, they were associated with gambling, with sedition, and with sex. The chocolate house was a place you went to strut around and be seen and to gamble and to plot. “Chocolate houses were, unlike coffee, associated with gambling, with sedition, and with sex.” It’s a satisfying story. There is a lot to say, and they say it well. They were married, they’re both anthropologists/food historians. Sadly, the wife died, and the husband continued it, but you can’t tell it’s written by two different people. From a literary perspective, that’s interesting too. Yes, Beau Brummell and Byron drank it in gallons. They used to go to a place called Berry Brothers and Rudd, which is still there. It’s been continuously trading since 1699. They have a pair of scales and they used to weigh themselves once a year. To be a little bit fat was a barometer of status as most people were surviving off disgusting pottage soup and flakey bread, whereas they had fine chocolate and haunches of venison and so on. It’s only really after England seizes Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655 that they secure a steady flow of the cacao beans. It’s a symbol of colonial enterprise, and, of course, Jamaica would become one of the worst places for the slave trade. I have this appalling image of this really vicious plantation owner or his lackey whipping the slaves in Jamaica and then, on the other side of the world, this man in his beautiful flowing periwig and cravat reclining in a St James’s townhouse sipping the chocolate without the slightest bit of concern about how it was cultivated. A bit like people taking cocaine today. Then, obviously, it was a luxury. It was more expensive than coffee, more expensive than alcohol or wine. By consuming it you were saying ‘I am superior’. This is taken to quite a demented conclusion in places like White’s Chocolate House, or Ozinda’s, or the Cocoa Tree, three of the most famous in St James’s. Because you have the wealthiest members of society, and the most profligate, what do they do? They just gamble to a kamikaze level. Horace Walpole recalls one night in the Cocoa Tree where £180,000 was riding on the throw of a single die, and that’s a game of hazard in which there’s no skill at all. It’s just pure luck. It was a nihilistic culture of just throwing away money for the sake of it — quite alluring in a warped way — which added to this sense that chocolate was this exotic thing tinged with danger and mystique."