Chocolate

Cocoa beans came to Spain with Cortés in 1528 and were at first available, crushed and pounded, as a stimulating, seductive chocolate drink, a drink too good for common people and kept only for the nobility of the Spanish court. It was not until 1585 that it escaped into the wider world. The first record of Jewish chocolate makers in France was in the early 1600s. Their relatives who, like them, fled from the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions, had landed in South America, Curasao and Jamaica and there they learned how to cultivate and process cocoa beans. They were soon ready to market them in Europe, and a number of these enterprising plantation founders decided to form trading companies to export the beans that would make a drink so irresistible it would seduce all the Catholic ladies of Spain and south-west France.