Bitter Chocolate (7 page)

Cocoa made its inevitabe journey up the Thames, arriving in London almost simultaneously with tea and coffee—along with
a new spirit of democracy coloured the erstwhile elitist beverage. England was giving birth to a “middle class,” an extension of a merchant culture nurtured in the expanding world of trade and travel whose members enjoyed many of the privileges and pleasures once exclusively reserved for royalty. Unlike in France and Italy, where chocolate was principally served in snobby salons, English cities opened public coffee and chocolate houses, where the stimulating brew was more or less slopped together and served quickly while men gambled, bantered and debated the state of the economy and politics.

On the continent, chocolate would continue for a long time to be part of the royal prerogative. The son and successor to the sexually unsatisfied Louis XIII, the ultimately more famous Sun King, Louis XIV, didn't like chocolate, but his wife, the Spanish Maria Theresa, was, predictably, a cocoa addict. Under her influence, the elixir grew in popularity in the French court, especially among women. A typical cocoa drink usually included vanilla extract—which had to be very fresh and oily—cinnamon, cloves, pepper and, of course, sugar. French servants presented the hot drinks in delicately painted porcelain cups perched on recessed saucers that were designed and made exclusively for sipping chocolate. And while the ladies and gentlemen of the court quaffed their cocoa, they naturally talked and debated every issue of their time.

The emergence of chocolate as a bracing social beverage coincides with the birth of revolutionary theories about social structures, human rights and natural justice. The case could be made that chocolate was a major element in the movement we now know as the Enlightenment. The drink was on the table when eighteenth-century thinkers started questioning long-held verities: the supremacy of the Church; the rights of kings; the potential for improvement in the common man and woman. And along with the middle-merchant class in England, a new division of intellectuals, artisans and authors was emerging. Ordinary people in
Europe, Britain and the American colonies were abuzz with new ideas, exchanging them, writing them down and translating them into their various languages.

The arguments of Hume, Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau crossed national and linguistic borders freely. Following the example of the Spanish priest Las Casas, philosophers such as Montaigne challenged the morality of slavery. Knowledge, by the early eighteenth century, was available in books for anyone who could read; the written word was no longer exclusively for the priests and scholars, nor was it limited to Latin texts. Progress, once the prerogative of God, became a goal to be pursued by everyone, and a mandate for people in control of human institutions. A whole new class of public advocates emerged in France: the Philosophes, secular intellectuals and independent thinkers who were accountable only to their principles. And it was in the chocolate houses, the coffee houses and the salons where a cross-section of a newly awakened public could ponder ideas and events, and read and exchange journals, broadsheets and books fresh off the ever-improving printing presses. The Cocoa-Tree Chocolate House on St. James Street in London became a popular hangout for Voltaire when he visited. Alexander Pope's epic
The Dunciad
makes reference to White's Chocolate House, probably the most famous cocoa hangout of its time, even before Pope immortalized it.

But the eighteenth century was, in the words of the future social commentator Charles Dickens, “the best of times, and the worst of times.” While the great thinkers debated equality, fraternity and liberty and championed the rights of man, they were sipping sugar-sweetened chocolate and coffee produced by the blood and sweat of slaves.

The native population in the Caribbean and on the mainland had been reduced to a fraction of what it had been when Cortés first arrived. And Africans, subjected to the most extreme abuse, struggled to survive the brutality of the Americas.

Cocoa production relied on a horrific system called triangular trade, a commercial arrangement of merchants and tycoons who plied the waters from Europe to Africa to the Americas. Ships would sail from European ports to the shores of West Africa bearing a variety of products, from salted cod to weapons. Once unloaded there, the ships would fill up with human cargo, bound for the Americas, where the slaves would be traded for agricultural products to be shipped back to Europe. The Africans would then be put to work raising more produce—sugar, rum, cocoa and raw cotton—for European factories and markets. It was a hugely successful system, made possible and vastly profitable by an incalculable cost in human lives and dignity.

Slave traders, with the help of Africans, who were recruited to do most of the dirty work, rounded up hundreds of thousands of men, women and children from their villages in Africa, marched them to collection centres with their necks in yokes, branded them with hot irons, manacled them together and stuffed them so tightly into the holds of ships that they sat between each other's knees for the voyage across the Atlantic. Tens of thousands died en route and were thrown overboard—sometimes cast into the ocean alive because they were too sick or too mutinous to be carried for the rest of the journey. Those who survived the crossing were delivered into conditions so arduous that their numbers had to be constantly replenished. Over the four hundred years in which the slave trade was active, an estimated twelve to fifteen million Africans became chattel in this highly lucrative, well-organized, church-sanctioned system.

There was a jarring disconnection between the reality of the slave ships furnishing the American plantations, and the elevated conversations in the salons and public houses of Europe. It was the age of enlightened speculation and idealistic schemes for the improvement of humankind, but it was also the age of mercantilism, a newly liberated business class with unfettered dreams of wealth and public influence. It was the beginning of a new age
of dissent. Influential merchants felt free to protest any hindrance to the flow of capital and goods—taxes and regulations were tantamount to oppression. The market should be a self-regulating organism. A new doctrine, laissez-faire capitalism, took on respectability once reserved for theology. The Philosophes could argue and discuss human rights until they bored each other to distraction, but nothing was going to interfere with an inspired new economic system that was transforming the world, and delivering cheap pots of coffee and cocoa to the tables where all the thinkers sat and speculated.

The new merchant class had money and time for recreation. They were clearing away the cobwebs of the medieval ages: superstition, witchcraft and ignorance. They were conspicuous consumers of goods from around the world. Chocolate was a natural adjunct to this ferment of enthusiastic sentiment. Prepared in the silver pots of the new chocolatier in Paris or tossed together in the rowdy chocolate houses of London's St. James Street, from beans ground by the housewives of New Spain or by professional cocoa grinders who went door to door in the fashionable enclaves of Madrid, chocolate, in this age of enlightenment, became as much a fixture in the lives of the newly wealthy merchants and liberated intellectuals as it had been for the aristocracies of times gone by.

In France, Louis XV fed chocolate to his many mistresses, and the most noted, “Madame de Pompadour,” became a famous addict, using cocoa as a treatment for her sexual dysfunctions. The Marquis de Sade, possibly the world's first serious sexologist, was hooked on chocolate. Doing hard time in prison for pornography and lewd offences, he ordered up copious supplies of chocolate: “boxes of ground chocolate and mocha coffee; cacao butter suppositories [a popular cure for constipation]; crème au chocolat; chocolate pastilles; large chocolate biscuits; chocolat en tablettes à l'ordinaire.”

The European demand for chocolate gradually overwhelmed the capacity of the plantations in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize.
New cocoa groves appeared in Venezuela and Brazil, and eventually in the West Indies and Jamaica. Hardy new varieties of cocoa bean emerged as diseases caused by overproduction on plantations created havoc for the cultivation of old varieties.

Meanwhile, the exertions of the intellectuals of Europe would eventually bear fruit in violent assertions of democracy in France and the colonies of North America. Declarations affirming the essential dignity of man would inspire new constitutions that guaranteed government accountability and the protection of basic human rights. The pious sentiments applied to everyone, it seemed—except where, in the name of commerce, expedient exclusions were deemed sadly necessary. Among them were the millions of wretched human beings engaged in primary production in the colonies: the harvesters of cotton, hewers of sugar cane and handlers of cocoa.

From the elite world of Montezuma's court, with its human sacrifices and overwrought banquets, to the rarefied chambers of European aristocrats with their powdered wigs and foppish clothes, to the loud and smoky clubs of English gentlemen, to the perverted pleasure palaces of de Sade's imagination—chocolate had arrived as the world's most seductive sweet.

T
HE IMAGES ARE PRINTED IN THE CULTURAL MEMORY,
thanks to Blake and Dickens: smoke and flame belching from the stacks of giant factories and mills; the wretched working class living in squalid hovels and teeming tenements; sprawling towns and cities turning the green Elizabethan countryside into an apocalypse of Victorian misery.

This is our emblem of the Industrial Revolution and the nineteenth-century transformation of British, European and American economics and society. It was, indeed, a time of massive dislocation, country people moving from small, marginal farms and rustic villages into new factory towns, where sweat and brawn and time had monetary value; where wages seduced peasants away from the unpredictable moods of the land and the weather, and the need to grow or build or beg or steal the necessities for survival. Now they could buy the basics with their hard-earned pay. And along with the necessities, the miracle of mass-production also made available small gratifications, pleasures once exclusively for wealthy merchants and the ruling classes.
Chocolate was democratized. And the working class indulged with zeal.

In the early 1800s, people still bought their cocoa in the apothecary shops, where it was sold along with other New World stimulants, including tobacco. But cocoa was losing its cachet and its market as customers eschewed the greasy, gritty chocolate drink in favour of more refined—and more easily prepared—beverages like tea and coffee.

The problem, from the beginning, had been cocoa's fatty by-product, a kind of butter, valued by the Maya and the Aztecs for its caloric richness, but unpleasant to the modern British-European palate. They'd attempted boiling and skimming and beating to remove it, and sweetening it to moderate the taste. They had succeeded in producing a tolerable and stimulating drink. But it took a lot of effort and a lot of time and the end product was still fifty per cent fat! In the age of progress and rising expectations, chocolate and cocoa were becoming a bit too bothersome when there were other more accessible sources of sensory gratification. Cocoa, and chocolate with it, was on the way out, relegated to the status of breakfast food for children. But machinery and the rampant spirit of invention would intervene on chocolate's behalf as they had for so many other commodities.

Even as a teenager working in his father's factory in Amsterdam, a visionary Dutchman named Coenraad Van Houten had been obsessed with figuring out how to separate the fat from the cocoa bean. It would take the invention of the hydraulic press—a product of the explosive growth in knowledge of mechanics in the middle of the nineteenth century—to pull it off efficiently. Where the Olmec and Maya spent hours grinding up small batches of beans into a crude but digestible paste, Van Houten
applied the full force of steel and fluid-driven piston to achieve what the Meso-Americans could never do by hand.

Van Houten's cocoa-pressing machine used six thousand pounds of pressure to squeeze the grease from the carefully roasted beans. The process left hard cakes of cocoa in one pan and a shimmering pool of coagulated yellow fat in another. It was the defatted cocoa Van Houten was after. The butter that gave generations in the New World energy to march for days through wilderness, conquering and pillaging as they went, was now mostly waste. The European housewife wanted a quick, easily prepared formula that would dissolve in hot water or milk, and Van Houten obliged. Through a careful alchemy, he determined the right amount of cocoa butter that should remain in the final product in order to impart a rich chocolatey flavour yet still create a compound that would emulsify. Van Houten ground the cocoa cakes up into powder, which he passed through a sieve, and then added quantities of alkaloids that improved the flavour and helped it blend with liquid. He gave cocoa a new lease on life: bottles of brown powder, labelled Van Houten's “Dutch” cocoa, soon filled the shelves of food shops all over Europe.