Overview

Chocolate is a mammoth work from the Chocolate History Group at the University of California, Davis. The culmination of ten years of anthropological and archival research, this is a book for a narrow range of readers with interests in food research, anthropology and history, or for those whose curiosity will be sated by an enormous range of fascinating tidbits about chocolate. As a volume representing the final output from the group, it is a collection of 56 academic essays covering anything from the religious significance of chocolate in pre-Colombian and post-colonisation societies to advertising cards in 19th century Europe and North America. As might be expected, this is no light reading and generalist readers may find it hard going. Despite the title, the remit of the research group was strongly oriented towards the Americas, leaving European chocolate history rather neglected in the final product.

Full review

The essays from this group of over 100 researchers are presented in eleven sections covering themes such as Beginnings and Religion, Medicine and Recipes, a range of geographic divisions, and Production, Manufacturing, and Contemporary Activities. Among the many essays the reader will find subjects like “Chocolate and Sinful Behaviors: Inquisition Testimonies”, “Silver Chocolate Pots of Colonial Boston”, “Dark Chocolate: Chocolate and Crime in North America and Elsewhere”, “Chocolate in France: Evolution of a Luxury Product”, and “Twenty-First Century Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding the Medicinal Use of Chocolate”. Each essay has extensive references and often numerous endnotes; these are academic articles intended for a scholarly readership.

Unsurprisingly, the text is fairly dry and intensely information-rich. Generalist readers will quickly lose interest when wading through descriptions of methodology and technical issues. A frequent superficial irritant is the overuse of the label “[sic]” in many historical quotes from times when spelling was less fixed. In the centre of the book are 67 pages of colour images, complementing the black and white images dotted through the text. Unforgivably for a work of this magnitude and cost to the purchaser, all of the colour images are poor quality digital pictures showing clear pixellation and compression artefacts. The remainder are mostly sharp, though lacking in contrast.

It is difficult to appreciate the full value of a volume like this without being in the midst of this kind of research — few people would have the breadth of knowledge to identify factual errors or methodological issues, but what the content certainly offers is a wealth of facts to keep pub-quizzers happy for decades. This work is not intended as a comprehensive, coherent guide to the history of chocolate, despite its title. Instead, it is a collection of researchers’ specialist interests.

Chocolate seems to have been something of a cure-all, healing everything from constipation to hypochondria. Simultaneously, it served as a valued luxury among some in the Catholic Church in Mexico whilst being regarded as a sinful substance for some in the Inquisition. Consumed mostly as a beverage, it could be flavoured with numerous spices, flowers or other substances, mixed with blood, or used as a vehicle for poisons. In the Americas it was frequently served after heavy frothing (though alas, there seems to be no explanation for this preparation to be found in this volume). The crushed beans were often mixed with other crushed seeds and flavours and kept as a paste until needed for drinking. Sugar gradually became an ingredient in these pastes. The introduction of chocolate of Europe led to interesting social changes, including the banning of Jewish chocolate merchants in Bayonne. And it’s entirely possible that the story of chocolate being made popular in France by Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII, is a myth.

The book makes little comment on chocolate past the early 20th century and it is a pity that the remit of the Chocolate History Group was so clearly focused on the Americas and especially North America. Although it’s certainly true that the existing literature on chocolate is at times Eurocentric (once it moves beyond Mesoamerica), the title of this book could easily mislead the reader to expect more than approximately 50 of almost 1000 pages to address chocolate in Europe. What in the table of contents is labelled as a “Chocolate Timeline” appendix turns out to be 73 pages of “Chocolate-Related Events in North America”. Parallel to the column of North American events is a column for “Chocolate-Related Events Elsewhere and Historical Context”. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these entries are completely unrelated to chocolate (“250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart”, “Albert Einstein postulates general theory of relativity”, etc). The fact that Mars Incorporated initiated and funded the Chocolate History Group is unmistakeable, with North American entries for “Mars Incorporated offers 2 million dark chocolate M&Ms for the return of Edvard Much’s [sic] painting, The Scream”, “Name of Milky Way Dark changed to Milky Way Midnight” and other trivialities that seem a little less than serious. In the final chapter on future directions for research, the editors acknowledge that their book has obvious gaps and was unable to cover a number of important countries in the history of chocolate.

Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage is a fascinating work for the intellectual chocolate lover, but best suited to researchers in associated fields. Putting to one side the flaws described above, it presents a valuable source of knowledge with much fascinating content.

[Note that the publisher's website contains some sample content.]