Hot chocolate

• 1. Introduction

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  Hot chocolate cost 50-75 pence a pound when the first Chocolate House opened in 1657. That was roughly 10-15 shillings, or about £45-65 in 2016 money. At that price a single cup was a genuine luxury, yet the drink itself had already existed for thousands of years. Melted chocolate or cocoa powder is stirred into warm milk or water and usually sweetened. That basic method still holds today, whether the cup is finished with whipped cream, marshmallows, or in some places cheese. So how did a drink with roots in ancient Mesoamerica end up costing a small fortune in seventeenth century Europe? What made cacao valuable enough to be exchanged like money, and how did one basic recipe split into the cheese-topped cups of Colombia, the egg-thickened Viennese version, and the frothy tsokolate of the Philippines?

• 2. Rank Ritual Currency

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  Cacao was first domesticated at least 5,300 years ago by the Mayo-Chinchipe culture, in what is now Ecuador. Other estimates put the cacao tree's domestication closer to 3300 BCE, with cacao already used to make beverages by at least 700 BCE. The Maya were drinking cacao beverages 2,500-3,000 years ago, and by 1400 AD the drink was essential to Aztec culture. During the Classic period, wealthy Maya drank from large spouted vessels that were often buried with them when they died. One such vessel came from a Maya tomb at Rio Azul, Guatemala, dated to 460-480 AD. It still carried the glyph for cacao, along with residue from the drink itself.

  When Europeans reached the Americas, they found the Maya serving their chocolate cold. The Maya ground cacao seeds into a paste and mixed it with water, vanilla, cornmeal, and chili peppers. They then poured it back and forth between a cup and a pot until a thick foam formed. Any Maya, regardless of social class, could drink it. Among the Aztecs, the same drink marked high status. It was considered a bad omen for someone of low or common rank to drink it. The Aztecs required conquered peoples to supply them with chocolate. Cacao beans, gourds, and cups all appear among the tribute recorded in The Essential Codex Mendoza. Cacao itself circulated as currency throughout Mesoamerica.

  José de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit missionary who lived in Peru and then Mexico in the late 16th century, described chocolate as "loathsome to such as are not acquainted with it," pointing to a scum or froth of unpleasant taste. He also called it "very much esteemed among the Indians," who used it to feast visiting noblemen. Spaniards living in the region, he wrote, grew "very greedy of this Chocolate," taking it hot, cold, or temperate, and mixing in chili. Conquistadors more broadly needed time to acquire the taste, since the drink was spicy and bitter, unlike the sweetened version familiar today.

  Elsewhere in Mesoamerica, many cacao drinks were flavored with flowers such as vanilla. That was a flourish Europeans would spend decades trying, and largely failing, to reproduce.

• 3. Chocolate Conquers Europe

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  The imperial court of Emperor Charles V was among the first in Europe to adopt the drink. Chocolate soon became fashionable among the Spanish upper class. Cocoa itself was valuable enough to be given as a dowry when members of the Spanish royal family married other European aristocrats. Because cocoa beans grew only in South America, the drink stayed expensive and largely out of reach for ordinary Europeans. It remained a mark of nobility well into the 17th century.

  One recipe from this period called for chocolate infused with fresh jasmine flowers, amber, musk, vanilla, and ambergris. It's a sign of just how heavily spiced hot chocolate could get in Europe. In the late 17th century, Sir Hans Sloane, president of the Royal College of Physicians, encountered cocoa while visiting Jamaica. He found it nauseous at first, but mixing it with milk made it more palatable. When Sloane returned to England, he brought that milk and cocoa recipe with him, introducing milk chocolate to the country. By 1797, the drink's aristocratic reputation had earned it the nickname "the drink of the gods."

  Spanish drinkers replaced the hollowed gourds used by Indigenous Americans with jicaras made of porcelain. They experimented with spices such as cinnamon, black pepper, anise, and sesame, trying to recreate flavors they could no longer easily source. Black pepper stood in for chili peppers and mecaxochitl, cinnamon replaced orejuelas, and sugar took the place of honey.

  In 1828, Coenraad Johannes van Houten developed the first cocoa powder-producing machine in the Netherlands. His press separated greasy cocoa butter from cacao seeds, leaving a purer powder that stirred more easily into milk or water. Using this cocoa powder alongside small amounts of cocoa butter also made it possible to manufacture solid chocolate bars, and the first one appeared in 1847. From that point, the word chocolate increasingly meant the solid bar rather than the hot drink. Around the same period, tradition holds that Turin's cioccolata calda was created in 1560. The story credits Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, who asked for a new drink to mark the capital's move from Chambéry to Turin. What his court received was this thicker, creamier version. Well into the 19th century, hot chocolate was still used medicinally, prescribed for ailments such as liver and stomach disease.

  None of these changes settled the question of what to even call the drink, a distinction that still splits cocoa from chocolate today.

• 4. Cocoa Versus Chocolate

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  Hot cocoa is made from cocoa powder, ground cacao beans with much of the cocoa butter removed. Hot chocolate, by contrast, is made directly from bar chocolate that still contains cocoa butter, cocoa, and sugar. That missing cocoa butter is the main reason hot cocoa is significantly lower in fat than hot chocolate. Even so, it still carries the same antioxidants found in chocolate. Some versions are made by grating or chopping dark, semisweet, or bittersweet chocolate and stirring it into milk with added sugar. Plain cocoa, by contrast, usually means cocoa powder mixed with hot milk or water and sweetened to taste, or left unsweetened altogether.

  Instant hot chocolate or hot cocoa mixes are typically built from cocoa powder, powdered chocolate, or a combination of the two. Many include powdered milk so the drink can be made without fresh milk, along with sugar or other sweeteners, plus stabilizers and thickeners. These mixes vary widely between countries and even between brands, differing in ingredients, ratios, and quality.

  Theobromine, found in the fat-free cocoa solids of the cocoa bean, is fat soluble. Adding fat to defatted cocoa powder increases how available that theobromine becomes. Whipped cream and marshmallows remain the most common toppings, though rum stirred into hot chocolate makes a drink called a Lumumba.

  Exactly how thick, sweet, or spiced that cup turns out depends heavily on which country happens to be pouring it.

• 5. Old World Variations

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  In mainland Europe, particularly Spain and Italy, hot chocolate is sometimes thickened with cornstarch until it reaches a much heavier consistency. Italy's cioccolata calda is one example. In Spain, hot chocolate is traditionally paired with churros for breakfast, thick enough at times to resemble warm chocolate pudding. In the Netherlands, a version called warme chocolademelk is a popular drink served at home and in cafes. The French typically serve hot chocolate at breakfast, sometimes alongside sliced bread spread with butter, jam, honey, or Nutella for dunking.

  Germany distinguishes between hot chocolate made from melted chocolate, called Heiße Schokolade Wiener Art, and versions made from powder, called Trinkschokolade. The melted version is often finished with whipped cream. In parts of Belgium and elsewhere in Europe, ordering a warme chocolade or chocolat chaud brings a cup of steaming white milk. Alongside it comes a small bowl of bittersweet chocolate chips to dissolve in. One Viennese variant of Heiße Schokolade Wiener Art adds an egg yolk to thicken the drink further.

  In the Philippines, the native version is called tsokolate, made from tabliya or tablea. These are tablets of pure ground roasted cacao beans, dissolved into water and milk. As in Spanish and Latin American versions, it's mixed briskly in a tsokolatera using a wooden baton called a molinillo, batidor, or batirol. That mixing gives it a characteristic froth. Tsokolate is sweetened with a bit of muscovado sugar and has a distinctly grainy texture. The same drink is called suklati in Kapampangan, sikulate in Maguindanao, and sikwate or sikuwate in Visayan languages. All of these trace back to the Spanish word chocolate. It's most often served at breakfast with kakanin or pandesal, and it's especially popular during the Christmas season.

  Cross the Pacific and the Atlantic, though, and hot chocolate settles into an entirely different set of local habits.

• 6. The Americas And Africa

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  In the United States and Canada, hot chocolate is most often served instant. It's made from a packet of cocoa powder, sugar, and dry milk stirred into hot water or milk. This thinner version is very sweet and typically topped with marshmallows, whipped cream, or a piece of solid chocolate. The Dutch brought hot chocolate to North America as early as the 17th century, but colonists didn't begin selling it commercially until around 1755. It has long been linked to cold weather and winter across the United States and Canada. Combined with espresso or coffee, the drink is sold in coffee shops under the name caffè mocha. That name comes from Mocha, Yemen, the town that grows the coffee blend of the same name.

  Mexican hot chocolate typically includes semi-sweet chocolate, cinnamon, sugar, and vanilla. It's sold in circular or hexagonal tablets that dissolve into hot milk, water, or cream, then get blended until creamy and frothy. Some consider it a children's drink, though people of all ages pair it with tamales. A 1942 article in the Chicago Tribune described Mexican cinnamon hot chocolate as traditionally served alongside sweet pastries such as pan dulce or churros.

  In Colombia, hot chocolate is made with milk and water in a chocolatera, stirred with a molinillo. It's part of breakfast alongside bread and soft farmer's cheese, often melted directly into the cup. Hot chocolate in Ecuador is topped with cheese the same way. In Peru, hot chocolate can appear alongside panettone at Christmas breakfast, even though summer has already begun in the southern hemisphere. Many Peruvians also add a sweet chocolate syrup to their cup. Argentina's submarino is made by dropping a chocolate bar and sugar into hot steamed milk. Various parts of the cacao tree, including its bark, fat, flowers, fruit pulp, and leaves, are still used medicinally across Central and South America today.

  In Nigeria and Jamaica, hot chocolate is simply called tea, a name drawn from the custom of calling any drink taken in the morning tea. In the cities of the Ivory Coast, it remains a regular companion to coffee at French-style breakfasts that some Ivorians enjoy today.