The True History of Chocolate

by Sophie D. and Michael D. Coe

published by Thames and Hudson, New York
ISBN 0-500-01693-3

The title of the Coes’ book was adapted from Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s book The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, and like any work which would claim to be the one-and-only accurate representation of historical fact, this book falls short. Although the Coes believe Bernal Díaz proved that a “true history” was more engrossing than “accepted fiction,” they later write of his suspect description of Motecuhzoma’s famous banquet. Unfortunately, The True History of Chocolate contains a few suspect descriptions itself. The major contribution this book makes to the literature on chocolate is its account of the pre-Conquest era, which is lacking in both detail and objectivity in many previous books. However, these same deficiencies appear in the Coes’ History when it comes to their writing on chocolate in modern times.

Before going further I need to detail my qualifications and reveal my biases. I am an associate professor of food science at Penn State University. Process engineering as applied to confectionery products, and chocolate manufacture in particular, is a major component of my research program, and much of this work has been funded by the industry. However, I do not endow technology with an inherent value–I consider it neither intrinsically good nor bad. I admit to a preference for dark chocolate, but I would not deny the pleasure of the confection to those who prefer milk chocolate. Enough said, now on with my review.

The Olmec of southern Mexico appear to have first domesticated cacao and originated processed chocolate 3000 years ago. Originally pronounced kakawa, “cacao” derived from the Mixe-Zoquean family of languages spoken by the Olmec, and was probably in use by 1000 BC. Sometime between 400 BC and AD 100 the ancestors of the Classic Maya received the word cacao from Mixe-Zoquean speakers. Cacao became known to the Spanish invaders from the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula and Central America and not the Aztecs.

The Maya had many ways of making food or drink from cacao, and used chocolate in marriage ceremonies in a manner similar to our culture’s use of Champagne. The Aztecs elaborated on Mayan recipes. The book does an excellent job of describing the preparation and use of cacao by pre-Conquest Mesoamericans. The etymology of the word chocolate, and the origin of the molinillo (molinet) are dealt with in detail. The most likely scenario is that the Spaniards combined the Maya word chocol, meaning “hot,” and the Aztec atl, meaning “water,” to produce chocolatl, which when tl is pronounced properly as te, becomes chocolate. Why the Spaniards created this word, instead of adopting the Aztec cacahuatl, is less straightforward. Caca in Spanish is a vulgar word for feces. The book suggests that the Spaniards substituted the Maya chocol because they were uncomfortable with a noun beginning with caca that described a thick, dark-brown drink. The wooden beater known as the molinillo was most assuredly introduced by the Spanish. The frothing of chocolate pre-Conquest was affected by pouring the drink back and forth from one vessel to another.

The True History of Chocolate does an admirable job tracing the diffusion of chocolate to and through the Old World. Neither Columbus nor Cortes are known to have introduced chocolate to the Old World as is often debated, although both had early contact with cacao. The first documented evidence for chocolate’s appearance in Europe was that presented to Prince Philip in Spain by the Kekchi Maya in 1544, and the first official shipment of beans reached Seville from Veracruz in 1585. While Anne of Austria or Spanish monks are often given credit for introducing chocolate to the French, the most credible theory appears to be that the Cardinal of Lyon, Alphonse de Richelieu, was the first in France to use chocolate, which he took as a medicine. Beyond this point the book begins to loose objectivity.

The book’s bias against quantity production pervades the last four chapters, and one could conclude that the authors consider commoners undeserving of chocolate.

The bottom line was this: compared to the higher quality cacao of Mesoamerica, the forastero cacao of Ecuador was always abundant, and it was cheap. Never mind that it didn’t taste very good–the beans were large, dry, and bitter–and that it was disdained by the Colonial elite of the Americas (who preferred Soconusco and Venezuelan cacao). It was generally known as el cacao de los pobres, “the cacao of the poor.”

Does this mean that criollo, still the best of the cultivated cacaos, the source of the chocolate drunk by the royal house of Spain, is finished? Gresham’s Law states that bad money drives out good. But , happily for our story (as we shall find out in Chapter 8), quality has not yet been completely driven out of the market by quantity, and there are still those who will pay the price for superior taste. There may not be any criollo cacao in the chocolate bars munched at European and American football games, but it lives on in luxury confections.

In fact, one soon finds out that “Chocolate for the Masses,” as Chapter 8 is titled, was an unfortunate consequence of the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution.

Like many histories, this one gets a bit nostalgic and assumes that everything was better in the past; that the chocolate of Baroque Spain must have been of the highest quality. But if we consider the conditions under which much of the cacao was transported to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, even the best of it was probably a bit moldy and infested with insects, and the criollo from Soconusco and Venezuela was probably subjected to a highly variable fermentation. It is quite easy to imagine that the forastero varieties being grown and processed today are actually better than the average criollo of the past.

Idealization of the past also appears in the section “The Fight for Pure Chocolate.”

The rising demand for chocolate made it a target for unscrupulous producers and merchants in many countries. In France, for example after the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, chocolate was being adulterated with powdered dried peas, flour made from rice or lentils, and potato starch (a favorite with such cheaters).

This seems to ignore,

Pre-Conquest chocolate was not a single concoction to be drunk; it was a vast and complex array of drinks, gruels, porridges,.... More commonly drunk was a gruel called saca (basically the same term that appears on Classic bowls), prepared from cooked maize, water and cacao.

Cooked maize is mostly starch. I suppose one could attribute to the Maya a “culinary sophistication,” which becomes “adulteration” when the motives are economic. But, the Maya too had a financial incentive to dilute cacao, since it was literally money, and “the Mesoamericans were expert counterfeiters of these beans.” Roasted cacao beans, even of the criollo variety, are unpalatable alone (few people enjoy the taste of baking chocolate), and chocolate has nearly always been prepared as a “confection,” a medicine coaxed into palatability by mixing it with pleasant tastes like sugar.

In the U.S., self-regulation by the confectionery industry predated government intervention. The National Confectioners’ Association (N.C.A.) was organized in 1884 to regulate the purity of confectionery products. The N.C.A. recommended banning the use of Terra alba and a number of other substances, including paraffin in 1904. Congress did not pass the Pure Food & Drug Act until 1905. Standards were set for chocolate and cocoa products in 1901. Standards of Identity still exist that establish the type and amount of permitted ingredients. To be called “chocolate,” these Standards forbid manufacturers from adding “cheap vegetable fats” and establish a minimum cacao butter content. Lecithin and other safe and suitable emulsifiers are limited to a total of 1.0% by weight, and are not added simply to reduce cost by substituting for cacao butter as the authors suggest, but also to improve the sensory quality.

The book is consistent in its bias against the branded chocolates of the U.K. and U.S, and doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of any good chocolate produced in these countries with the exception of Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate and Green & Black’s “Maya Gold.”

The English, continental European, and American chocolate manufacturers may have been benevolent towards their own factory workers, but they seldom displayed concern for the welfare of the producers in the tropical countries where cacao is grown.

However, missing from the section “Quaker Capitalists” is any real description of their decade-long fight against slavery on Săo Thomé and Principe. A struggle documented in William Cadbury’s Labour in Portuguese West Africa, which effectively ended the “Chocolate Islands” role in the cocoa trade.

Milton Hershey is unfavorably characterized as a “benevolent dictator” from a “pious” Mennonite family, and no mention is made of the fact that he spent large sums of his personal fortune to keep the town of Hershey, not limited to his direct employees, working through the Great Depression. While information provided by Hershey is labeled “pious company literature,” the authors have no problem believing Valrhona’s marketing director, Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate’s owner or Green & Black’s brochure. However, from the Coes’ description, the piety of Quaker and Mennonite chocolate makers may have appealed to the strong “puritanical streak” of the Aztecs. The book claims that European chocolatiers have been far more concerned with taste quality than their colleagues in Great Britain or the United States, citing Godiva Chocolatier of Brussels as an example, but fail to mention that Godiva is owned by the Campbell’s Soup Company.

The authors are perhaps the least particular about the accuracy of the nutritional information. They write of the “fat-free native cuisine” of Mesoamerica, appearing to ignore the fact that cacao seeds are approximately 50% fat (cocoa butter), which is probably one reason they were so prized by the indigenous populations in the first place. A calorically dense food such as cacao would have been ideal as a field ration for warriors. In fact the book quotes Bishop Landa concerning the uses and preparation of cacao in late pre-Conquest Yucatán.

And they get from the cacao a grease which resembles butter, and from this and maize they make another beverage which is very savory and highly thought of.

Later on they repeat the claim that Valrhona’s “Guanaja 1502” has 70% “cocoa solids,” a world record–but only one tenth the calories of the typical, mass-produced chocolate. This statement is simply outrageous.

In the Preface, Michael Coe expressed the desire to maintain the rigor his late wife applied to her scholarship, insisting that nothing be presented as fact that could not be backed up by solid data. I found this attention to detail appealing in her book America’s First Cuisines. I trust, given their substantial credentials, that this rigorous standard of scholarship applies to the first five chapters of The True History of Chocolate, and in particular to the information on the pre-Conquest period. Perhaps the book should have ended there.

If mass production per se is deleterious to chocolate quality, how big is too big? Does it matter that Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate is manufactured in the same plant, probably on the same equipment, that is used to make “commercial” chocolate. Are only recent technological innovations bad? What about the original stone metate, wasn’t it once a technological innovation, and what of the conch which “vastly improved the quality of chocolate confectionery?” While I would like to believe that more expensive, limited-edition chocolates are better, if for no other reason than to justify the amount of money I spend for them, I don’t believe technology necessarily leads to the “dull-brown stuff that tasted...like the smoke of a rubbish fire” described in George Orwell’s 1984.

The True History of Chocolate makes a major contribution by bringing new insight to chocolate’s early history, and for this reason is a must read for anyone interested in chocolate, despite its shortcomings.

Greg Ziegler
Associate Professor
Penn State University

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