More Chocolate
A chocolate house in England (1700s)
When Spanish invaders came to the court of the Aztec ruler Montezuma in 1519, Montezuma naturally served them chocolate in gold cups. The Spanish soldiers didn't like chocolate very much, but they drank it to be polite. When they realized that chocolate had caffeine in it like coffee and tea, they thought maybe they could sell it back home in Spain, where coffee and tea were the new big thing. Some Maya people travelled with the Spanish to Spain and brought samples of cocoa with them.
Sure enough, rich people in Europe loved chocolate drinks. People said chocolate was the food of love. Europeans mostly drank chocolate hot, like coffee and tea, and they added sugar, because sugar was also a new big thing and people were already adding sugar to their coffee. By 1689, Hans Sloane in Jamaica thought of adding milk to chocolate, and with milk and sugar hot chocolate became more like the hot chocolate we drink today. In 1674, a coffeehouse in London began using chocolate to bake the first chocolate cakes and cookies. But only rich people could have chocolate, or coffee, or tea, or sugar - all these things were much too expensive for most people. And people thought chocolate was for grown men, like coffee and tea - not for women and certainly not for kids.
Meanwhile in Mexico, Spanish Christian nuns began to add cocoa to traditional Aztec sauces (mole, from the Aztec word for sauce). Soon a lot of people in Mexico were making sauces with chocolate in them, often with chili peppers as well.
More about Chocolate
Early History of Chocolate
Learn by Doing - Chocolate Mousse Project
For more information about chocolate, check out these books from Amazon or from your library:
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