What city did chocolate come from?

Answer 1

Chocolate - Dark Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, chocolate chock full of nuts, raisins or honey crisps,chocolate cream pies, chocolate sprinkles, chocolate drops,chocolate dipped ice-cream cones, chocolate swirls and peppermint stick twirls - chocolate! The world's favorite treat comes in many shapes, forms, consistencies and flavours. It shouldn't take long now before someone, probably a woman, lobbies to have chocolate proclaimed a major food group. Chocolate does, after all, work a tiny miracle on those annoying PMS days. It's also a delicious way to celebrate Valentines and Mother's Day. And in those busy times leading up to any major holiday, chocolate displays seems to ambush harried shoppers wherever they go. Special celebrations always include a myriad of chocolate treats - Santas and angels, bunnies and candy covered chocolate eggs, Halloween witches, warlocks and pumpkins all made out of chocolate! What in the world would we do without it? And where in the world did chocolate come from in the first place?

The Mayans and Aztecs harvested cocoa pods from cacao trees3000 years ago, fermented them, then prepared a bitter, chocolatety drink called xocoatl, meaning "bitter water". Sometimes they added vanilla or maize to dilute the strong flavour. They also sipped the drink during religious ceremonies and used the beans as a source of currency. Christopher Columbus brought cocoabeans back to Spain in 1502. But it wasn't until 1519 that anyone took any real notice of chocolate. Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortez, who had sampled the bitter Aztec drink in the New World, brought the recipe back to Spain. Most Spaniards found the drink much too bitter and added sugar to make it more palatable. When princess Maria Therese married Loius XIV of France, she took her fondness for the xocoatl beverage with her to Paris and by 1657 a London shop was selling solid chocolate. Soon chocolate houses were flourishing all over Europe, catering mostly to the rich, since they were the only people who could afford to enjoy the treat.

Over the next few decades more and more refinements occurred like mixing chocolate with milk instead of water and patenting a process where most of the cocoa butter was pressed from the bean, producing a cocoa powder. Dorchester, Massachusetts was the location of the first North American chocolate manufacturer in 1765. In 1847 Fry and Sons of England took cocoa butter and mixed it with chocolate liquor and sugar and produced the firsteating chocolate. By 1876 a Swiss process added dry milk to the normally dark chocolate to create milk chocolate, a treat that became immensely popular. Continuing manufacturing innovations soon helped the price of chocolate to drop. By the end of the 1800's chocolate was available to everyone, not just the rich.