Chocolate Runner’s Blog

Posted By Jon on September 24, 2004

You are visiting the private museum of Dr. Rudolf J. Muffinschmidt. Over the years he has amassed a giant eclectic collection of oddities and rarities from around the world. Some are extremely rare, some extremely valuable and some are just plain strange.

“Right this way.” he says with great anticipation his voice, leading you over to a small darkened room. There is a single overhead spotlight shining down into the center onto a small glass case.

“This, ” he announces, “is my latest acquisition. A priceless treasure that I bought for a mere $500,000! It is a chocolate bar that was once bitten by George Washington.”

You look at the small, dull-looking bar and note that it does indeed have a bite from one end.

“Its a fake.” You say matter-of-factly to the now enraged Muffinschmidt.

“Preposterous! I demand an explanation for this outlandish accusation!”

You know it is a fake because:

1) George Washington had terrible tooth decay (hence the wooden teeth) and could not have dealt with the pain of heavy sweets in his mouth, irritating his raw and damaged dental nerves.

2) The chocolate bar would have fallen apart in the first hundred years because cocoa butter biodegrades rapidly in oxygen, and it is doubtful that 18th century confectioners had access to argon storage containers to preserve it properly.

3) George Washington had died more than 50 years before chocolate bars had been invented and unless somebody had been doing some really funky stuff with reanimation (Frankenstein style), there’s no way he was biting any chocolate bar, wooden teeth or no.

4) Chocolate had been banned in America because it was a product of England, whom we completely hated at the time and the last thing that we wanted to see in our port was another British ship, unless it had a Yankee Doodle cannonball hole in its side.

You have 60 seconds to answer.

No peeking now.

Ding! Time is up!

I don’t know if George Washington would have had trouble with chocolate, even if his teeth really were wooden. He did run a candy store you know. And maybe chocolate would have degraded in 200 years, but they do dig up well preserved 2000 year old people now and then so a chocolate bar would not necessarily be out of the question. And although we did hate the British, there were plenty of “chocolate houses” in the states because cocoa beans came from South America, not England.

If you answered 3, then you would be correct. Until the mid 1800′s “chocolate” was only available as a drink, and then to mostly the affluent because of the expense of producing it. Because of all the cocoa butter in the ground cocoa beans, it didn’t blend well with water. Proper mixing and heating and stirring could produce an acceptable beverage. Remember “Like Water for Chocolate”? Hot! It worked best when the water was very hot.

In 1828, C. J. Van Houten patented a press that could squeeze the cocoa butter out of ground up cocoa beans to produce a hard powder cake of dry cocoa. Allegedly, he got the idea when he saw a sack of processed cocoa beans that was hanging from a hook on a hot day. The cocoa butter was dripping out and onto the floor. By pressing it (with later modifications to the press) he could squeeze out almost 95% of the cocoa butter.

Being a chemist, I have to point out that Van Houten (also a chemist) made his greatest contribution to chocolate, not just by the press (which the physicists were not smart enough to invent), but by treating the cocoa powder with alkaline salts, which smoothed out the flavor, darkened the color, but most importantly made it easier to mix with water. This same process used today is called “dutching” (’cause that dutch guy invented it, you know). The joy of all this was that Van Houten had now found a way to cheaply produce a chocolate drink that mixed easily and had a much more pleasant flavor and texture. Now everyone could afford to have chocolate drinks every day! Yeah!

So what do you do with the cocoa butter? Well, someone got the idea to mix it back in with the powder and add sugar. This produced a solid chocolate bar.

There is some controversy about who did this first. Fry and Sons were thought to have produced a chocolate bar around 1847, and Cadbury (yes, you know that name) produced an “eating” chocolate bar for sale in 1849. You can thank Henri Nestle for inventing milk chocolate in 1875, by adding sweetened condensed milk to chocolate (they had invented it to use in baby formula). Rudolph Lindt developed a process in 1879, called “conching”, which grinds the cocoa to a fine powder to produce the smooth chocolate that melts on your tongue. If you want to get technical, you can credit Lindt for producing the first “modern” chocolate bar. Hershey didn’t arrive on the scene until 1900, and his big break came when he was awarded a huge military contract to supply chocolate bars to the WWI troops.

That’s the brief history of the modern chocolate bar. Chocolate itself has a history that dates to the time of the Maya at least 1500 years ago. But that’s a much longer story.

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