Pods on a tree trunk
Chocolate grows on the cacao tree, which only thrives in the hot, wet band within about twenty degrees of the equator. Its flowers and big, ribbed pods sprout straight from the trunk and main branches, and the flowers are pollinated not by bees but by tiny midges. Each pod holds around forty CACAO beans in a sweet white pulp. The beans are left in heaps to ferment for several days, which begins to develop the flavour, then dried in the sun and shipped. Today around three fifths of the world's COCOA comes from just two countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana.
Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, because they cannot break down a chemical in it called theobromine. DARK chocolate contains the most.
From a drink to a bar
For centuries chocolate was only a drink. In 1828 a Dutch chemist, Coenraad van Houten, invented a press that squeezed most of the fat, called cocoa butter, out of the roasted beans, leaving a cake that could be ground into cocoa powder. In 1847 the Fry company in Bristol mixed cocoa powder, sugar and melted cocoa butter into a paste that could be pressed into a mould, and made the first modern chocolate BAR.
Milk chocolate was harder, because the water in milk made the chocolate spoil. In 1875 the Swiss chocolate maker Daniel Peter solved it using condensed milk made by his neighbour, Henri Nestlé. A few years later Rodolphe Lindt invented a machine that stirred chocolate for days, making it far smoother than before.
Why chocolate melts in your mouth
Cocoa butter melts at around 34°C, just below the temperature inside your mouth, so a piece of chocolate stays solid in the hand for a while and then melts on the tongue. Chocolate makers temper it, heating and cooling it carefully so the fat sets in one particular crystal form, which gives a glossy snap. If it gets warm and sets again, a dull whitish bloom appears on the surface. WHITE chocolate contains cocoa butter, milk and sugar, but no dark cocoa solids at all.
GANACHE, chocolate melted with cream, has a legend attached: a French apprentice is said to have spilled hot cream into a bowl of chocolate, and his furious master called him a ganache, an idiot, before discovering the result was delicious.
A chocolate taster at school
In the 1930s, pupils at Repton School in Derbyshire were sent boxes of new chocolate bars by the Cadbury company to test and give marks. One of them was the young Roald Dahl, and he later said it was where the idea for Willy Wonka began. Our Roald Dahl page covers the books.
NUTELLA began in post-war Italy, when cocoa was scarce and expensive. In 1946 a baker in Piedmont, Pietro Ferrero, stretched it with the region's plentiful HAZELNUT to make a sweet paste sold in blocks to be sliced onto bread. A spreadable version followed, and it was renamed Nutella in 1964. The grid also holds chocolate in every form, from a MELTED CHUNK in a COOKIE and a CHIP to FUDGE, MOUSSE, a TRUFFLE, a PRALINE, a BONBON and a BROWNIE.