Chocolate industry is an industry worth approximately 110 $ billion per year. Children and grown ups all over the world enjoy the taste of chocolates.I am also one of them. Today I learned that the story behind chocolates is not so sweet. So today's topic is how the taste of chocolates shaped the history..
People started using chocolate 1000s of years ago. Ancient mesoamericans,especially Mayans and Aztecs used chocolate as a drink. They cultivated cocoa, fermented the beans,roasted and grinded and turned them into a paste. That paste was mixed with water,vanilla,honey,chilli peppers and spices and used as a drink.It was used by royalists, high priests and people with higher ranking. So it was a luxury. They believed that it possessed mythical and spiritual qualities.
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| Photo credits :By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons |
Aztecs couldn't grow cocoa in the dry highlands where they used to live.So they traded cocoa beans with Mayans.In 1500s a Spanish person named Hernan Cortes who sought gold and silver came to mexico and he was fascinated with the taste of chocolate. So he returned to Spain with Cocoa beans. Within a short time period it became very famous in Spain,but again it was a luxury. They kept this beverage as a secret for almost a century until a daughter of the Spanish king Philip III married a French king named LouisXIII. She took the secret of chocolate to France with her and soon the whole Europe fell for the taste of chocolate. They started cultivating cocoa in their colonial plantations,and slaves from Africa were imported to those areas. In 1828 a dutch chemist named Coenraad Johenas Van Houton invented the Cocoa Press which was able to separate cocoa butter from cocoa powder. Later people discovered that it can be mixed with many other ingredients such as milk powder,honey etc and make chocolate bars.
Today two thirds of the world's cocoa production is done in West Africa and chocolate is widely used around the world. There are so many types of chocolates such as, milk chocolate,dark chocolate,white chocolate and unsweetened chocolate.
Writing about chocolates made me want to drink a hot chocolate now...!!! Till I come back tomorrow, have a chocolate day friends..
:)
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