Early Chocolate Manufacture

Appears in
Chocolate: The Food of the Gods

By Chantal Coady

Published 1993

  • About

The first detailed account of the preparation of the drink comes from the Italian merchant seaman Benzoni in 1540. On his travels in the New World, he came across Native Americans preparing cocoa. He was intrigued by the sight of the drink, but was not tempted to try it until his supply of wine had been used up. He watched them drying the cocoa beans, roasting them in earthen pans over a fire, and grinding them between the stones which they also used to grind flour for their bread. They put the resulting paste in cups of calabash, a kind of gourd, and mixed it with water. They then used a special wooden stick, called a molinillo, to beat the mixture. Maize was added as a primitive emulsifier, to help incorporate the cocoa butter. (It was not until the nineteenth century that a Dutch chemist called Van Houten finally worked out how to extract the cocoa butter, to produce the dry cocoa powder which we know today.) Benzoni found the drink bitter, yet satisfying: refreshing without being intoxicating. He also notes its sustaining properties, and the fact that the Native Americans who drank it regularly had thought him foolish to have been so disdainful at first of their nourishing drink.