Chocolate

by Sarah Moss

  At this point, late in the nineteenth century, chocolate took on the finished forms, either as solid bar or as covering for other confections, we know best today. The same is true of the manufacturing processes that nearly all large-scale manufacturers follow to the present day. By the turn of the century, each step of the process was almost entirely mechanized. The first steps of chocolate manufacture are roughly the same as those that had always been used in preparing it: the beans are sorted and cleaned, and then put in large rotating roaster ovens that roast them slowly, both to develop the flavour and aroma and to make shelling easier. The roasted pieces are broken coarsely and hard bits of germimated bean and the pieces of shell are sieved and winnowed away respectively. The remaining beans, or nibs, are then ground more thoroughly. The friction of the grinding produces enough heat to melt the cocoa butter so that not a dry powder but rather a liquid paste, known as cocoa mass, is produced. It was essentially this mass, mixed with sugar and cooled again into a solid cake for making drinking chocolate, that was sold throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In the modern process, the mass is then put into a press like that developed by van Houten, where the lemon-yellow cacao butter flows out. The resulting hard cake (‘if one were banged on a man’s head it would probably stun him’ said a description from 1920) is then re-ground (and possibly ‘Dutched’) for processing into cocoa powder, or it is moved into chocolate production. For making chocolate, the pressed cake is recombined with sugar, traditionally in a mélangeur like that developed by Suchard in 1826, which is two heavy granite millstones which sit in a revolving granite basin. This sweetened mixture is then recombined with some cocoa butter or with other fats, vanilla, milk powder and whatever other ingredients are to be added and passed through a series of rollers which mill the particles into ever-finer granules. The only major innovation in the process that has happened since this era came after the Second World War with the addition of lecithin, an emulsifier made either from eggs or more often from soy. It is added both to cocoa and chocolate to improve blending and texture. The final step is conching, the process developed by Rodolphe Lindt. This process, which according to connoisseurs should take at least three days, often now takes place in hours. Finally, the chocolate, which up until this point has been kept at about 65–70°C, is moulded and tempered, that is, cooled quickly to about 40°C in order to force the cocoa butter to form crystal structures that will resist melting.

  Conching machine, based on the 1876 invention by Rodolphe Lindt.

  While chocolate took on its familiar forms just over a century ago, it was some time before these forms became widespread through all parts of society. It was not until nearly the turn of the century that a chocolate bar was affordable for the working classes in Belgium, for example. Cocoa, by contrast, became affordable and increasingly was seen as a nutritious foodstuff and meal replacement. As early as 1780 the British government had commissioned from the firm of J. S. Fry & Sons a standard ration of chocolate (in the form of solidified cocoa mass as described above) for seamen in the Royal Navy as a nutritious food source and alternative to rum. Fry’s proudly referred to this naval connection in their advertising for many years. By the time of the First and Second World Wars, chocolate had completed its march to a mass-produced standard-issue foodstuff, and national firms proudly and patriotically (and of course lucratively) contributed it to the standard rations of the armed forces on all sides. Already in the First, but particularly during the Second World War, such chocolate rations were used symbolically to turn soldiers from all sides back into men when they encountered civilian populations, serving as paternal peace offerings to children and often more loaded gifts to women.

  American GIS in Normandy distributing chocolate to children, June 1944.

  Cadbury’s advertisement: solid chocolate as a treat for middle-class children.

  ‘Whitening’ Chocolate –

  Bourgeois Domestication

  As we have seen, chocolate had been associated with women from the conquest of South America onwards, but in the early nineteenth century this association occurs in a new context. Far from the black magic wrought in the back streets of seventeenth-century South American cities, Victorian chocolate is linked to a thoroughly domestic idea of femininity primarily justified and fulfilled by motherhood. The ideology of the bourgeois family was central to nineteenth-century Europe, and chocolate, as ever, found its place at the era’s heart. The new, and recognizably modern, advertisements of the Victorian era show how chocolate producers were able to exploit the simultaneous development of manufacturing processes, branding and the nuclear family.

  Unlike the ‘conversation pieces’ of the eighteenth century, which show chocolate as an aristocratic accessory, nineteenth century images of chocolate in the home are cosy and emphatically middle-class. Chocolate is not a luxury associated with sensual indulgence but healthy nourishment for growing families, what caring mothers provide for their children. The link between chocolate and childhood strengthened through the nineteenth century. Chocolate adverts from the middle of the century onwards were filled with pictures of frolicking, often chubby and cherub-faced children. The motif of happy families, with a direct appeal to mothers as the source of this happiness (as well as the supplier of cocoa), became an important component in marketing chocolate. In its new guise as nutritious food, chocolate adverts mustered images that were of maternal and/or nurturing femininity, as in Dutch manufacturer Droste’s now-famous cocoa label featuring a nurse, introduced around the turn of the century.

  Fry’s chocolate advertisement, 1920s.

  Chocolate as mother’s milk: Helm cocoa advertisement, c. 1900.

  The rise of the chocolate box in the same period provides some famous illustrations of this new identification with bourgeois domesticity. Like so many other developments in the creation of familiar forms of chocolate, the development of bite-sized filled chocolates arranged in a box that is at least as important to the purchase as the contents resulted from the combination of new technologies and broader social change. Cadbury’s put the first box of chocolates on the market in 1868, shortly after importing their Van Houten press and increasing production. It was also in the 1860s that the first factory-produced greeting cards were sold, featuring similar images to those used to decorate the earliest chocolate boxes. The boxes were designed to outlast the contents and they were often used as long-term repositories for small objects of emotional value, particularly letters, as if the chocolates were both representing and marking the place of future tokens of love. It is easy to see how, in this context, the taste and ingredients of the chocolate could become secondary to the symbolism of the packaging, which, then as now, offered a simulacrum of the jewellery box to which it might be a forerunner. In the early years of the twentieth century and especially after the First World War, chocolate packaging proliferated. Decorated tins were cheaper to produce than decorated boxes, as well as being more durable. Tins of Quality Street, which are still a feature of a great many British Christmas gatherings, were first produced in 1936, with both the name and the figures on the tin taken from a typically nostalgic play by J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.

  Britain was not the only place where the development of a manufacturing process for producing chocolate products went hand-in-hand with key packaging and marketing developments. In 1912 the Brussels chocolatier Jean Neuhaus (notably the grandson of a confectioner from Switzerland) developed a technique for making a hard chocolate shell for making filled chocolates or pralines. The name ‘praline’, referring to filled chocolates, sometimes generates confusion, particularly in the anglophone world. Especially in North America, the word also refers to a confection of nuts (normally pecans) and caramel, and is furthermore similar to the term ‘praliné’, which now refers to a specific type of nut and sugar (and sometimes chocolate) confection often used as a filling in chocolates. All of these words derive from the name of the seventeenth-century French Maréchal du PlessisPraslin, who
se cook purportedly invented the sugar-coated nuts. In a time of rapidly evolving confections and rising standards of living, the new filled chocolates rapidly caught on as a refined and elegant treat, and the word itself spread into German and Dutch as a synonym not for sugar and nuts but chocolate confections. Such filled chocolates soon spread beyond Neuhaus and became a trademark of Belgian confectionery more generally. The firms Leonidas (founded by a Greek-born American in 1910) and Godiva (established in 1926, now owned by a Turkish company) followed suit, also specializing in filled chocolates. Today, specialist manufacturers use the form to experiment with ever more exotic fillings and flavours such as black pepper and tamarind.

  Godiva chocolates.

  Unlike Cadbury’s heavily decorated and reusable chocolate box, Neuhaus took a different tack in packaging their new creations. In 1915 Neuhaus’s wife Louise Agostini, a ballerina by training, replaced the paper cones in which pralines were originally sold with a one-piece, hand-folded box, the ballotin. The ballotin was never patented and soon became, as it remains, a widely recognized sign of superior chocolates, which were particularly associated with Belgium partly because of the success of the Neuhaus firm. These elegant but flimsy cardboard boxes have promised high quality, ‘hand made’ chocolate for nearly a century, while hinged tins which last for decades are associated with inferior, mass-produced candy. For post-industrial consumers, elitism can be proved by a preference for form over function, but there is also a tendency to prize what is, or appears to be, artisanal and ‘hand-crafted’ over what is obviously the result of a mechanized process. Cheap chocolates which come in tins and bear the stamp of the machines that made them, perhaps in the form of animals or flowers, also come with descriptions which make no reference to the manufacturing process. Quality Streets include ‘orange-flavoured truffle with orange crunchy pieces’ and ‘soft toffee finger dipped in milk chocolate’, while even the newly repackaged Black Magic, intended to profit from a perceived vogue for the ‘dark’ chocolate which has always been a minority (and elite) taste in the UK, limits itself to ‘dark chocolate wrapped around smooth praline with chopped roasted hazelnuts’. By contrast, Neuhaus’s ‘Caprice’ ‘harbours an incredibly crunchy nougatine. A subtle mix of caramelised sugar and hazelnuts that melts in the mouth, is folded and filled by hand before being immersed in a chocolate dip.’ Montezuma’s, an artisanal British chocolatier, assures buyers that, ‘Each and every truffle is handmade by our skilled chocolatiers who pass all that pride and passion into great chocolate.’ The more expensive and ‘better’ the chocolates, the more they have been handled, folded, immersed, filled and generally fondled. The cheap stuff pops unashamedly from a machine, like bullets.

  Origins are back: Montezuma chocolate bar.

  These multiplying forms and packages for chocolate in the nineteenth century were associated with maternity, domesticity and romantic love – but only for the middle and upper classes. Discussion of chocolate became decidedly paternalistic when aimed at the working classes. Solid chocolates were treats for middle- and upper-class women and children, but for working-class families, cocoa became an equivalent to soup – warm, ‘nourishing’ and cheap. In discussions of chocolate’s benefits to the working classes, its metaphorical and/or material association with milk – a pure and healthy substitute for solid food – gained new emphasis. Chocolate had long been drunk as a nourishing food substitute among the poorer classes in South America (and was a sanctioned way of ‘cheating’ on Catholic fast days among most classes), and as it became more affordable in Europe, such uses were similarly encouraged. Like sugar, which was similarly promoted to the working classes, chocolate appeared as abstract food – pure calories to fuel working bodies. Certainly the association of chocolate drinking with languor and idleness had vanished by the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, it was considered something that would boost industry and production. A 1906 treatise claimed: ‘Cacao is the most nourishing of all drinks, it is almost without exception the cheapest food that we can put together. One could call it meat and drink. If only the poorly-nourished working man and the overworked factory child could be put in a position to use it instead of that brew they call coffee and tea, they would benefit from it in all respects.’ Of course the ruling classes would also benefit if workers would adopt this apparent miracle food to keep them working rather than demanding things like, say, increases in their material means or better conditions for children in factories. Chocolate’s stimulating properties, which the same book credited as greater than coffee’s but less than tea’s (!) were also mentioned in this regard. (This was measured by pure amounts of caffeine, teeine and theobromine, respectively, under the erroneous assumption that they all have the same effect.) Chocolate was not only thought of as a replacement for food, but particularly among the temperance-minded (who included the owners of a number of chocolate factories), it had long been seen as a wholesome replacement for drink. Not only would it keep the factories running, chocolate would thus also counteract the disorderly proclivities of the lower classes.

  Cocoa as fuel for manly work: a Cadbury’s advert from around 1900. Note the working-class habit of drinking from the saucer.

  The identification of chocolate as fuel for ‘manly’ work contained another irony within the chocolate industry. While bourgeois women and children became the most visible consumers of chocolate, with increasing mechanization, and thus decreasing levels of heavy physical labour involved in processing, women and children also began to make up larger and larger proportions of the labour force manufacturing chocolate. By the turn of the century, the majority of those working in chocolate factories in France, Britain and Germany were women, and to a lesser extent children. A 1920 treatise describes how most of the steps in making chocolate cremes are undertaken by men, but assures readers that ‘the covering of cremes and the packing of the finished chocolates into boxes are performed by girls. Covering is light work requiring a delicate touch, and if, as is usual, it is done in bright airy rooms, is a pleasant occupation.’ The description of paid factory labour is made here to sound much more like the pastimes of more well-to-do women like needlework or other decorative hobbies, taking place in an aesthetically pleasing, almost domestic, environment. Many of the larger companies were well-known for their paternalistic care of their employees – women employees of Cadbury’s are apparently still issued a Bible and a red carnation upon their wedding day – though at least by the twentieth century, the need to employ married women remained a continual contradiction of the ideal of the domestic housewife that companies such as Rowntree’s sought to promote externally.

  Paternalistic contradictions aside, many nineteenth-century firms did indeed see their factories as places to improve manufacturing processes and products but also the lives of their workers as well. In Britain it is particularly noteworthy that all of the chocolate firms that grew to prominence in the nineteenth century were owned by Quakers. Fry’s in Bristol, Cadbury’s in Bournville (near Birmingham) and Rowntree’s in York each owned model factories which supplied housing and access to education to many of their workers. In addition, many of them did work actively – if not always successfully – to combat the slave trade. Of Mennonite rather than Quaker heritage, Milton Hershey perhaps took the role of philanthropic capitalist to its greatest extreme at his business in the ‘Quaker State’. In the years after he bought the equipment from the Chicago Exposition, Hershey did not merely build a factory, but starting in 1903 he built the entire model town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, complete with houses on tree-lined streets, parks, schools, stores, banks and so on. The town continues to thrive, now not just as the home of Hershey manufacturing (which it still is), but also as a tourist attraction, supplemented by resorts and amusements that are all owned by the Hershey company.

  Women working in Rowntree’s factory in York. Note the decor on the walls and efforts to make this a domestic atmosphere.

  As chocolate was adopted by more of the bourgeoisie in Europe, i
t was domesticated not only within the ideal nuclear family, but also within the other great social invention that came into its own in that century: the nation. The emphasis on domestic manufacturers of chocolate slowly came to obscure the places where the cacao was grown (though as we will see below, not entirely). Many of the advertisements for chocolate make the link between family and nation quite explicitly. On chocolate labels and adverts, chocolate factories proudly displayed themselves as part of national and urban landscapes, while images of frolicking children within them emphasized – sometimes simultaneously – the maternal nature of feminine homelands. In addition to these urban developments, nations like France that were beginning to record their various regional foods into a catalogue of rich and varied national traditions began to explore the artisanal roots of chocolate. The local cultures of chocolate in places like Bayonne were re-crafted into parts of national folklore, hallowing relatively recent customs with the incense of time-honoured tradition. Such images of ‘natural’ homelands were always misleading, however, particularly in the case of the two countries we now most associate with fine chocolate. Chocolate’s associations with Switzerland and Belgium have nothing to do with any native natural product, nor did either have direct colonial cacao connections. For a number of reasons Switzerland happened to be a centre of industrial innovation. Belgians, on the other hand, showed themselves above all adept at creating and marketing filled chocolate confections.