You're Dead to Me - The History of Chocolate

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

Greg Jenner is joined by chocolate historian Alex Hutchinson and British TV legend Richard Osman to explore the culinary and cultural history of chocolate - Britain's favourite confectionery.Just what did the Maya use to flavour their cacao? How did cacao become chocolate and find its way into our shops and hearts? And why did a family feud change the entire branding of a much loved chocolate bar?A Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. All day long.

Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors. Like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. comedy show, Horrible Histories. If you've not heard it before, this is the history podcast that adds a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, with sugar standing in for bum jokes and medicine being the factually rigorous analysis of prior human behaviour.

Catchy! Anyway, today we are serving up a historical tasting menu that begins in ancient Mesoamerica and ends in your local corner shop, as we discover all there is to know about your favourite smooth, sweet treat. No, not Idris Elba. I'm talking about the nation's favourite snack. It is, of course, the history of chocolate. And to help me do that, I'm joined by two delectable guests. In History Corner, she's a historian, author, broadcaster and novelist, and she was the archivist for the famous chocolate companies Roundtree and Nestle for over a decade. It's all-round chocolate expert, Alex Hutchinson. Hi, Alex. How are you?

Hello, Greg. Are you feeling chocolatey today? I'm always feeling chocolatey. You've arrived with chocolate. I have arrived with chocolate, yes. Always. We didn't even tell you to bring chocolate, you just turned up with it. I always bring chocolate in my pockets.

You're like Paddington, but with chocolate. Yes. Lovely. And in Comedy Corner, he is a titan of telly, a super producer, presenter and game show guru. You'll have seen him on literally every funny panel show going. He's the Prince of Pointless. He gently quizzes child geniuses. He makes celebs look cheerfully silly on Richard Osman's House of Games.

And he's also a novelist, because apparently everyone now has to write novels. Clearly I'm missing out here. It is the wonderful Richard Osman. Hi, Richard. How are you? I'm really well, Greg. Other than I thought we were doing the history of Idris Elba, so I'm slightly disappointed.

But listen, let's go with chocolate, my second favourite thing. Where would you start with the history of Idris Elba? Well, I slightly disappointed. But listen, let's go with chocolate, my second favourite thing. Where would you start with the history of Idris Elba? Well, I guess at his birth. Is that not traditional? You conventionalist, honestly. Or maybe the marriage of his parents. I don't know, how far back would we go? Richard, you are famously into your chocolate.

Yeah, I love a bit of chocolate. Obviously, I did the World Cup of Chocolate on Twitter and the book The World Cup of Everything. I'm slightly obsessed with the chocolate that we see in our corner shops. You like street chocolate. None of this hipster stuff. You can tell the social history of a country

through the mass consumption of things much more than through anything else. So television to me always tells you the history of a country. But supermarket shopping and snack shopping tells you the history of a country just as well. I'm very excited to go way back when in the history of chocolate but so long as we I'm very excited to go way back when the history of chocolate, but so long as we end up somewhere around 12, I'll be happy.

So, what do you know? All right, so we begin with the so what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you at home might already know about today's subject. And obviously, it's chocolate. You know what chocolate is, you're not an idiot. You might know that there's a sort of Aztec connection because of the famous chocolate shop, Montezuma, named after an Aztec emperor. As for pop culture, there is that nice

song by the 1975. You may have seen the movie Chocola, or Edna Novel. The movie, of course, is a bittersweet romance starring Johnny Depp. Or maybe you've seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a bittersweet romance starring Johnny Depp. Sorry, no, that's not right. It's a bizarre movie about a sociopathic weirdo and his clone army of Oompa Loompas whose attitude to child safety is reckless at best.

Frankly, should never have been released. Anyway, you'll know the big-name British chocolate brands like Round Trees, Fries and definitely Cadbury. The history of chocolate is something we probably all know a little bit about. But how much more is there to sink our teeth into? Let's find out. Before we talk about where chocolate comes from, let's talk about literally where it comes from.

Richard, you're a famously clever man. What do you know about the cacao plant? Oh, what do I know about the cacao plant? Well, listen, we're just down the road from the Groucho Club, so I know all sorts about the cacao plant. South American, I think. Very bitter seed, which they used to make the chocolate, I think. I absolutely got through that without any shakes of the head. That's all I got there, Alex.

Alex, what do we think? So yes, South America, lovely tree, unusual in that the pods grow out of the trunk of the tree rather than off the branches. Get out of town. are full of big chunky beans and pulp. And those beans are fermented and then squished and then roasted and then squished some more and then you have chocolate. And in terms of its life, we can go back to at least 5,000 years ago, 3,300 BCE in Ecuadorian, the Mayo Chinchipe culture, which obviously we know very well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ask me everything I know about whatever the thing you just said was. It's the Maya, really, yeah. Ask me everything I know about whatever the thing you just said was. It's the Maya, really, who are the first people in history that we're aware of who really can leave a little bit of evidence for us to tantalise and get to grips with. The Maya were at their peak as a civilisation around 250 to 850 CE,

so nearly 2,000 years ago to nearly 1,000 years ago. We know a little bit about how they consumed their chocolate or their cacao. It's not yet the sort of delicious Yorkie bar we see in the shops. It's a drink bit about how they consumed their chocolate or their cacao. It's not yet the sort of delicious Yorkie bar we see in the shops. It's a drink, isn't it? It is. It was bitter, but they might have added some chilli

to give it a bit of spice, some honey. And it was strangely, peculiarly addictive because it contains the abromine, which is an alkaloid. Caffeine's an alkaloid as well. It's so moorish, you just can't help going back. It's so bitter, but you want more. And is that why it became popular? You presumably have tasted it in its raw form.

I have it here in its raw form. Do you want to taste it? Yeah. Here we have some cocoa nibs. That's a good radio sound effect. Yeah, it was, isn't it? Cocoa nibs. These are bits of the broken bean.

This is just it in its original form. Have a sniff of that. Isn't that just the most fabulous smell? Yeah, that's quite something. It's so potent. It's like it in its original form. Have a sniff of that. Isn't that just the most fabulous smell? Yeah, that's quite something. It's so potent. It's like it's got booze in it. It does. It smells a bit alcoholic, doesn't it?

That is heady, isn't it? It smells a little bit of bananas. And the Meyer might have chucked that in some porridge, but they'd also have ground it down into a powder, mixed it with water and made a liquid drink. But they wouldn't have thought of this as a food. And we think they had it hot. We think they had hot chocolate.

Well, you'd need it hot because it's got fat in it. Over 50% of the cocoa bean is cocoa butter. It's fat. So you're going to need that hot water to get it to all dissolve. When you go to your local coffee shop and you order a hot chocolate, are you going for cream? Do you have cream in it or just chocolate? Oh, just chocolate, I think.

Cream's a bit much, isn't it? That's like buying a chocolate bar and saying, just put a little bit of cream on the top of that, would you? Just send you a newsagent. I would love that. If anyone's willing to make those for me. It's an idea, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Just to sprinkle stuff on top of your chocolate bar. No, no, no. The chocolate in itself is enough for me.

Well, the Maya, they like there to be a bit of a froth on top. I think human beings are attracted to drinks with a foam on the top. Think about it. You're flat white. Finally someone said it. Fine beer. Milkshakes, when I remember milkshakes from the 1980s. We just like bubbly things.

Bubble baths. Well, yeah. Yeah, we like them. There are one or two images that suggest that the Maya were pouring this drink between two vessels. They were pouring it from a great height, and as it fell down into a waterfall into a bowl below, it would bring up a foam. So the foam was the good bit? That's where we got the aero from.

There's also a really lovely document called the Madrid Codex, which sounds very fancy. Codex just means book. I'm afraid it's not quite as fancy. What does Madrid mean though? Madrid is a lovely city. Oh, never heard of it. And in the Madrid Codex,

we see also there is a religious element to it. There are the gods depicted with this chocolate, but they are sprinkling some stuff on it that you don't really want to sprinkle on your chocolate. Uh-oh. Where's your brain gone, Richard? Well, listen, I really don't want to know. I mean, I know enough about the ancient gods to know they would literally do anything.

Okay. It's not that. Okay. It's not quite that bad. It's blood. Okay. Blood and chocolate. It's funny how that It's not quite that bad. It's blood. Okay. Blood and chocolate. It's funny how that's actually now quite a pleasant surprise. Yeah, exactly. That sounds like a Red Hot Chili Peppers album, doesn't it? I think Blood and Chocolate's a movie.

Yeah, is that right? I think it's a horror movie from the 90s. But yes, we have this religious art which shows that the gods would be pierced their ears with obsidian lances. Obsidian is a very, very sharp natural glass. Gotcha. And then they would bleed onto the cocoa pods. You know what? They didn't used to have TV back in those days, very sharp natural glass. Gotcha. And then they would bleed onto the cocoa pods. You know what? They didn't used to have TV back in those days, so you had to do something.

The other thing to say about the Maya is that they considered chocolate to be valuable as an actual physical currency. Yes, there's some evidence that they were using the beans as currency. But what I think is wonderful is that there is some archaeological evidence that fake beans were made.

Somebody somewhere at the time was faking counterfeit cocoa beans and they have been found left as offerings to the gods and I reckon it's the teenage son of the priest going, you know what, dad's just left these for the gods the gods don't need them, they're too busy piercing their ears with obsidian glass. Yeah.

Let's just nick them and leave them as replicas but they have fooled archaeologists who send them away to find out which type they are. Putting's just nick them and leave behind replicas. But they have fooled archaeologists who send them away to find out which type they are. Putting them in arcade machines and stuff. Shopping trolleys. So they literally had chocolate coins. They're traded as a commodity. They're associated with the gods.

It's more to them than just they're delicious. They have a power. And did it happen there, by the way, because that plant doesn't exist elsewhere or were they the only people to work out exactly what you could do with those pods? Funnily enough cocoa is so difficult to grow and it will only grow within a certain range of the equator it doesn't like anything below 16 degrees c it's very very fussy about which trees it's grown near it can't be grown in a plantation of just cocoa trees because it's

susceptible to all kinds of disease and stuff and the only time I know that it's ever been really, really successfully grown in England was in York in 1932, when some people at the Round Trees factory said, we've done some experiments with pineapples, we think we can grow a cocoa tree. They got a hothouse, they practised, they managed to grow one pod.

They took the beans, turned them into one tiny, tiny chocolate bar, and gave them to the Princess Elizabeth, who is now Queen. No way! That's amazing! The Queen Elizabeth II is the only person in the world to ever have eaten 100% British cocoa.

That's brilliant. What an amazing fact. Five a metre, that's literally the only thing I'm going to ask her. You then see the demise of the Maya civilisation. They're Maya carry-on as people, but there's a major civilisation at the end. And then you get another civilisation coming in, who are the Aztecs. And they're also into their chocolate.

But they're a little different because they like their chocolate cold. Well, they're tougher, aren't they? That's a burn, isn't it, to the Maya? Yeah. If there are any Maya listening, we do apologize. So they would have it as a drink cold. It's still a drink. It's still a drink.

But it's difficult to know for certain how they drank it because we have such limited records. Their books were on bark. And not only did they deteriorate, but the ones that we managed to save ended up in Germany or in various places in Europe. But the most famous was in Dresden and was damaged during the Second World War. It wasn't the worst thing that happened in the war. It wasn't. Yeah, I'm going to give you that. It's a shame though.

And the Aztecs were also flavouring their drinks. We've already mentioned chilli and honey and vanilla, but they also would put in flower petals. So they would use magnolia petals and do not try this at home. There's an alkaloid in magnolia petals. So they may have been doing it for the buzz. Oh. Don't try this at home.

I think there are some poisonous types and some other types and I don't know enough about, I'm not a magnolia historian, Try this at home. I think there are some poisonous types and some other types. And I don't know enough about, I'm not a Magnolia historian, but they may have been doing it for the buzz. Get me a Magnolia historian, Greg. Jasmine petals was something in Europe later on. But I think that the Aztecs were doing this for the buzz. But you still get rose chocolate now, don't you? And violet chocolate.

Yeah. All those artisan chocolate shops now. So they're dressing up their drinks. They're dyeing it red as well with a thing called achiote. And they also mix in gruel, the porridge-y, maize-based. It's almost kind of Cocoa Pops-y. The Spanish carried on with this. If you add cornflour to cocoa, it thickens it and makes it less of a watery thing with fat floating on the top and a much nicer drink.

There's a chocolate shop in Soho which serves Spanish-style hot chocolate. And it really is liquid chocolate with corn flour. It's like drinking chocolate custard. As well as the Maya, the Aztecs also associated chocolate with ritual sacrifices. That hasn't changed to this day of course. Every Christmas you get the quality street out, a little ritual sacrifice

and watch Gavin and Stacey. It's lovely. Merry Christmas everyone. Taylor's oldest time. Once a year there was a sacrificial offering where someone would be given a drink. It was essentially a sort of Dutch courage drink in that it was made of chocolate, but also the water of a bloody knife, wasn't it? Like the bloody knife be cleaned in the water from a sacrificial offering and then you drink that. Give them some booze.

For goodness sake. On that note actually, Richard, what do you think the punishment for getting drunk was in Aztec society? There were some days where you were allowed to get drunk, but mostly you weren't. What do you think the punishment was? It won't be like a kind of an £8 fine. You need to pick up litter by the roadside. I imagine some sort of appalling death.

Hang on. Appalling death. That's always the answer on this podcast, though. Yeah, it's either that or something to do with penises. But yeah, it was appalling death, basically. So chocolate was consumed as an alternative to alcohol as well in Aztec society. It sounds like it was kind of quasi-religious in these societies. It had an incredible sort of place.

Well, there's been an exciting development in the history of chocolate and archaeology in the last couple of years. This is a topic of debate. So for many years, we've believed that the aztecs drank cocoa and it was only for the elite however there was some archaeological evidence in utah that 800 years ago some peasant farmers who lived in pit dwellings were importing cocoa and were consuming it in their pit dwellings and and were obviously trading in cocoa. So this would mean that everything we thought about cocoa and who it was being consumed by was wrong. Utah is not in Mexico.

No. That's a long way from the border. It's a long way. And this is something that archaeologists are still arguing about. But if it's true, it means that perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps it wasn't just for the elite. Montezuma stockpiled cocoa beans as a currency, but it's possible that poorer people had access to cocoa.

The Aztecs were obviously conquered by the Spanish who came in 1519, and traditionally people have said that Hernan Cortes, the conquistador, you might have heard of Richard, he was supposed to be the first to bring chocolate back to Spain. Cortes the killer, right? Yeah, I mean, he wasn't the heard of Richard. He was supposed to first bring chocolate back to Spain. Cortez the killer, right? Yeah. I mean, he wasn't the nicest of men. But there's very little evidence for this, actually. We really don't think that's true. It does arrive back in Spain in probably the 1530s.

And also, the Spanish aren't tremendously into it initially. I mean, there's a quote from José Acosta, who's a Jesuit missionary who's out there, and he says it's loathsome having a scum of froth that is very unpleasant to taste. But it does come into Spain, and in 1545 we know that the king of Spain is presented with chocolate by Maya and Aztec priests, I think, who've been brought over. So he gets the authentic thing, the real thing. And it then comes into Spain a bit more sort of drips and draps.

We know, is it Seville where they start to import it into in 1585? Is that right? Yes, that's the first record of an import. So Jose Acosta may have thought that cocoa was disgusting, but we've all been to coffee shops where we've had terrible coffee. So it depends on who's making it. Yeah, but they do start adding sugar and vanilla and honey into it because they're not keen on the bitterness. There's another reason it's not just the bitterness. If you're having 100% dark chocolate and it's not being diluted with milk or hazelnuts or anything, it will wick the moisture out of your mouth.

So if you've ever been to the shop and got a bar of 100% dark, put it in your mouth, you immediately need water and you feel a bit strange. So it's not just that they don't like the bitterness. You really do need to add things to it. So the Spanish got it before us, though? Yes, and then it spreads through Europe and we know it gets into the court in Louis XIV in France, and we know that Cardinal Richelieu really likes it.

But we're not quite sure how it spreads. You know, this is one of the interesting conversations. Is it spread by royal courts doing diplomatic stuff? You know, they're sending gifts between each other. Is it princesses marrying off into different kingdoms? Or is it monks? Yeah. but is it princesses marrying off into different kingdoms or is it monks?

Yeah, monks and friars were very big on the cocoa, particularly because so many of them went to South America to live there and got a taste for it and also believed that it had medicinal properties. They tell their brother priests, try this. It's really good for your spleen. It's a bit good for you, isn't it, chocolate? Sometimes they say. Listen, I'm almost certain the cream egg is not good for you. But there's a certain type of chocolate that's good for you. It's a real reaching, it's a bit good for you.

I'm not kidding. The Royal Society of Chemistry have published a book on this, The History of Chocolate as a Medicine. And there is now so much research into cocoa and the things that cocoa can do for us and our health. And it's amazing i knew it what's interesting actually about the monks is that they have a really heated debate about hot chocolate do you want to have a little guess what they're arguing about richard from a religious point of view i mean whether it's whatever their version of kosher is oh that's good yeah now yeah i'll give you that oh really oh great pretty much it's not quite kosher but they're arguing about whether it counts as a food they have to fast a lot and some of the

monks are like well it's it's a drink so it's fine so clever and some of the monks like no it's a food it's definitely a food and it divides down the lines of you've got the dominican monks who are like this is clearly a food come on come on come on come on come on and then the jesuits who are heavily involved in importing it from south america like no no this is this is definitely a drink so it doesn't doesn't count as breakfast at all. Right, like where certain things have VAT and certain things don't. You know, the classification of what your food stuff is. If you're the one importing it, it's very important.

The Jaffa Cake debate. Yeah, yeah, let's not. That's a podcast. So in the end, you have to get a pope involved. You know you're in trouble when you have to get a pope involved. 1662, Pope Alexander VII decides that chocolate was not a food. The pope said nope. Which meant that, technically speaking, Cocoa Pops are not a breakfast cereal.

Cocoa Popes. Cocoa Popes. Oh, that's the big booking. That's where we get him. It's kind of interesting because it's about what happens when you introduce a new food and you have all these religious rules about it, and is it a food or not? Now, scientifically speaking, the cacao plant is known as Theobroma cacao. Do you want to have a little guess about what Theobroma means?

Theobroma. Well, I know Theo Walcott means disappointing career. So is it a disappointing drug? Underwhelming stimulant. So Theobromin. It means food of the gods. Of course it does. Theo.

Yeah. I was so thinking about Theo Walcott too much. We all do. I went for the joke instead of the clever thing. And that name was given to it by a very famous 18th century naturalist called Carl Linnaeus, who is a Swedish, one of the most important people in the history of science, really, because he comes up with the whole classifications

of animal species and plant species. He calls it the food of the gods. So obviously he disagrees with the Pope. The Pope said, no, no, not a food at all. But we also know that it is being put into other foods as well. My favourite is chocolate lasagna in Italy in the 18th century. Wow. Which is a great idea.

Chocolate lasagna, of course, exists to this day as viennetta. Oh! You're right. That's a bold statement. Well, I mean, this was 18th century lasagna. There was literally pasta in it. But of course, it's literally chocolate pasta. But you're right.

I guess viennetta is a sort of chocolate lasagna. So in Britain, you might get ox chalut, which would be chocolate with meat in it, to fortify the invalid and the cyclist. And the cyclist. That was what the label said. It's an ox chalut to fortify the

invalid and the cyclist. So it would be like chocolate with sort of bovril in it. The leap from a drink that's maybe a food and that you can maybe use in savoury cooking to confection doesn't happen until really relatively recently, like 150 years ago. In England in the 1660s, we get Charles II on the throne

and his dad has had a bit of an accident with an axe. This is a time of enormous political fear and tension and Charles is worried about chocolate. He was, because it was seen as a drink for rebels. It wasn't something for fine ladies, as it was in France and Spain. There was a chap in the 18th century, a young man, who was reported to have said, I dress at about 12 o'clock, go to the Cocoa Tree,

chocolate and coffee shop in London, where I talk treason. But it seems that at the time, cocoa was the drink for intellectuals and political thinkers rather than a luxury or a privilege. And Charles tries to close it down. He tries to close down the coffee shops and the chocolate shops, doesn't he? Isn't that funny? Just crossing

the channel becomes culturally a different thing. Yeah. Well, it had trouble crossing the channel. The first shipment of cocoa that came into the hands of the british and i think it was a spanish ship that got off course and the british seized it and they thought that it was full of sheep droppings and so they burned it wow and it smelled delicious hold on a minute and then once it got to england we treated it completely differently and it was more democratised. So it's political, it's radical, it's associated with people who want to take on the king.

And we drank it completely differently. There are some records of chocolate fortified wine. Oh, that sounds nice. Chuck some cocoa in some wine. It was also a health food drink. There were some manufacturers who were making it with Iceland moss, which is a kind of lichen. Everything about British chocolate came from just a completely left field perspective compared to Europe.

Well, speaking of British chocolate, we need to get on, I suppose, to the more famous side of it, which is the Quakers. The fries in Bristol, the Cadbury's in Birmingham, the Round Trees in York. Alex, what is it about Quakers? Why are they attracted to chocolate as an industry? They were attracted to grocercers' shops. For Quakers in Britain, for many, many years, they were restricted from going to universities, being MPs. But one thing they could do was go into business. And when they went into business, they were seen as being much more trustworthy. Grocers, up until the 1860 Food and Drugs Act, maybe even later, you couldn't trust them not to put sawdust in your bread or some wax in your cocoa. There's one story of a grocer who was going around the backs of hotels and buying up used tea leaves at a time when tea leaves were

still incredibly expensive and then drying them out, soaking them with sheep dung, and then reselling it as though it was new tea, you had one of two choices. You could either buy from a cheaper grocer, but run the risk that they were doing something terrible to your food, or you could go to a Quaker, and they would charge you more money. But you knew that they were going to act with integrity. And one of the reasons was because if they didn't, other Quakers would be out to get them. Oh yeah, you don't want to cross a Quaker. Their faith, of course, said, you know, you've got to be honest and trustworthy. And you

knew that they weren't faking it because for some Quakers, they ran the risk of being thrown in prison just for being Quakers. The lady who founded the Roundtree's chocolate dynasty, her granddad ended up in prison just for being a Quaker. The others all said, don't fake it, quake it. To make chocolate is so complicated. We've already talked about the cocoa nibs and the beans and the roasting. It takes an apprenticeship. And grocers were the only people in Britain who were getting apprenticeships in how to make cocoa.

So it was natural that the Quaker grocers started making drinking cocoa. And it sold so well, their businesses took off and they just made them huge. And is it also associated with the temperance movement as well? You know, the fact that perhaps they don't drink alcohol and perhaps they're making chocolate drinks as an alternative? Now, that's a common myth. For instance, the Fries owned a brewery at the same time as they owned a cocoa factory. See, when you said that, I thought, well, this is what I've heard.

The Quakers, obviously, it was essentially to stop people drinking. They would make chocolate instead. But not true. I often hear people talking about the very strict rules that Quakers had. So if you go into a Quaker meeting house, you'll see a big red book and it says advice for Quakers. Advice. It's not rules. They're more like guidelines.

The whole point of being a Quaker is there's no priest to tell you what to do. Your conscience and the spirit of God that moves you tells you what to do. And everything else is guidelines. So it means that each individual Quaker decided whether or not they were abstaining from alcohol. So the Fry's owned a brewery. There are some records that Joseph Rowntree used to buy champagne by the case, possibly because he thought it was good for his digestion. And there were some Quakers who were staunch teetotalers. Some of them abstained from

spirits, but thought that maybe a glass of wine was okay. But they didn't see chocolate as an alternative to alcohol. Henry Isaac Roundtree thought coffee was an alternative. I've always thought that's why the Quakers took up chocolate. It was the temperance movement. But it's the apprenticeship. So it was the apprenticeship. There was one other element later. There was a movement to try to help working men get off the booze. And for a long time, if you were working somewhere where there was no staff canteen, the only place to go and eat your sandwiches would be your local public house. And you can't sit there and eat your sandwiches without buying a drink.

And there was a movement among the temperance league. They started cocoaa Rooms. This is different to a cocoa house. Cocoa House were hotbeds of sedition and Charles II tried to have them banned. Cocoa Rooms were places a little bit like the YMCA. You could go and get a cup of cocoa, maybe a Chelsea bun. You could sit and read some improving literature.

They might have a little lending library, eat your sandwiches. Definitely not buy alcohol, go back to work. That sounds quite nice. Yeah. Bring that back. There were some Quakers who believed that cocoa was going to be an alternative to alcohol, but that wasn't why they got into it and that wasn't its purpose. So we get the big Quaker companies now beginning to industrialise.

The Fries in Bristol, the Cadbury in Birmingham and Roundtree in York. So how do we get the arrival of solid chocolate bars, the delicious chocolate bars that I eat on a daily basis? Is chocolate paste delicious and smooth, like Idris Elba, or is it gritty and hard, like Idris Elba in The Wire, which is the crucial thing? This is where the fries of Bristol and also Cornelius van Outen and Conrad van Outen... Not Denise van Outen.

So they change everything. They invent a way to take these cocoa nibs and to squish them with a press that squeezes cocoa fat out of them. Here we have in a bag some cocoa butter. Oh, yes. Cocoa butter melts at body heat. So because it's in a bag, it's solid. Would you like to try to describe it, Richard? Okay.

It's like a solid but crumbly. I think it's like a super tough milky bar. I would say it's like a super tough milky bar. I would say it's like a super tough milky bar. That's how I would say it. That's how I would describe it. I'm going to say it looks delicious. It looks like the sort of thing you would see in a very posh chocolate shop you get now. Yes.

They'd have sort of chocolate shavings or something, and they would call it offcuts or something like that. And it looks like that, and it would be absolutely delicious. Try it. Oh, wait. Check the packet. Does it say it's edible? Because I got that for making makeup with.

Richard Osman poisoned in BBC podcast. I mean, just give it a go, shall we? Yeah, give it a go. That's not worth eating. No? You regret it? Do you want to take the taste away with a coconut? I've understood now why I've never eaten cocoa butter before.

Having said that, I'm now going to try it. It's that weird thing where people are like, try this, it's awful. And you're like, all right. Oh, no. It's more, you'd get it in lush rather than hotel chocolate. Yeah, that's very soapy. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I'm not enjoying that at all. Put it in your bath, by all means. It says it's from the soapery. There you go. We just eat soap. Imagine this. You're a Quaker. You're making your drinking cocoa.

And you've tried every which way to absorb the fat. You've added Iceland moss lichen. You're making your drinking cocoa and you've tried every which way to absorb the fat. You've added Iceland moss lichen. You've added flour, corn flour, and nothing's really mopping it up. And then along comes this delightful Dutch guy with a press that presses all the cocoa fat out of the cocoa solids and leaves you with something that's a little bit more like a powder, like the cocoa powder that we would buy from the shops to put in a chocolate cake. The cocoa fat was just a by-product, but Fry's of Bristol realised if they got some cocoa and then added some extra cocoa butter into it with some sugar, they had suddenly made a completely new thing, which was a solid chocolate bar, and it completely

changed chocolate. Ah, okay. But the guys who changed it, who invented the press, are not the guys who invented the chocolate bar. Fry's invented the chocolate bar. No, no. It's the guys who invented the press. They're just doing it to make their... The Van Houtens. The Van Houtens.

They're just doing it to make their drinking chocolate more dissolvable in water, more soluble. Fries are the ones who say, let's try and make an eating chocolate. And they give it a French name to make it sound fancy and posh, which makes me suspect that possibly somebody in France had done it first. They got the idea from them, and that we just don't have the record. So they make this first bar of chocolate, and from then on, suddenly, the fate of chocolate is sealed.

It's no longer going to be a lasagna ingredient or a scary chocolate drink for murderous Aztecs and Maya. It's a sweet. So what year was this? So this is like the birth of chocolate as we understand it now as we go and buy it in the newsagent. It is, yeah. It was from this moment with... 1847.

1847. Richard, do you want to have a guess what was in the Cadbury fancy box? Well, I assume that that's like a Black Magic type chocolate assortment type of thing. Oh, yeah. And then some. This would have been later than... This is 19th century, isn't it? Yes.

Now, all chocolate manufacturers were making fancy boxes. So that first chocolate bar was created, and then the fries work out a way of putting a fondant centre in it, a little bit like your Cadbury's cream egg, which came later, which was in fact first made by fries. It's a fries cream egg, not a Cadbury's cream egg. Really? Yes, Cadbury's rebranded it.

Once they'd come up with this new technology to put a fondant centre inside a chocolate, then suddenly everybody starts making what they call French-style confections. So I suspect there were some French artisans who'd done this first, but on an industrial scale, round trees, Cadburys and Fry's all start making fancy

boxes, and they were boxes of chocolate, but they were often covered in silk and tassels and lace, and they were boxes of chocolate but they were often covered in silk and tassels and lace and they were handmade and in the 1930s they were still making these and there was one box that ran trees made which cost a hundred shillings and at the time the rent for the average family in a slum dwelling in york per week was 10 shillings a week so a hundred shillings for a month yeah so it was a super luxury item still it's truffles it's not just chocolate

it's for all the stuff we still know now certainly strawberry flavoured fondants still my favourite by the way and marzipan a lot of chocolate ginger chocolate ginger was really really big in the fancy boxes until 1933 when round trees decided they wanted to make

an assortment that could be eaten in the dark in a cinema. And if you're eating it in the dark, they need to know for certain that you're not going to want to spit any of them out. And they did some research and discovered the one chocolate that if you didn't like it, you would have to spit out, was a chocolate ginger. I'd be like that, chocolate ginger or coffee chocolate. Yeah, coffee, not for me.

Those are the only two chocolates I'm not interested in. I can't get involved with coffee at all. So the others worked out fairly quickly what the fries had done. Was it kind of obvious what they'd done? It was obvious what they'd done, but they were the ones who had the technology to do it. Up until the fries, making chocolate was something that you were doing really on the same scale as we might do in our kitchen.

So roasting cocoa beans was done on a frying pan over a naked flame. Whereas they invent a cocoa roaster, they invent all kinds of steam powered grinding machines they industrialize it and then cabarets and round trees have to try to keep up they also need some chocolate experts because chocolate's really difficult to make and to make a success of these chocolate bars they had to do a thing called tempering you've got to do a fancy stirring thing i've seen master chef i know i know tempering well you all know tempering it's bake off they're always in tempering yeah that's the only thing They're always doing tempering, aren't they?

It's the only thing I ever learned from there. I know what a sack of torta is and I know how to do tempering. Yeah, and I'm also a salsify. I know what that is. Yeah, because of that. But difficult back in those days. This is pre-Mary Berry, just about. You've got to get those Form 5 crystals before you have the scientific knowledge to understand that you're trying to get Form 5 crystals. Right, yeah. Cambria are renowned for their hot chocolate drink

and their slogan was absolutely pure, therefore best, which is a good slogan, slightly wordy. There's actually quite a clever way that they prove this, essentially, and they basically get the government on board to help market it. Cadbury say, look, we're going to buy this Van Outen Press. We're going to be the first people in Britain to have it. It means we can make soluble cocoa powder by squishing the fat out with the machine.

How do we pay for it? I know. Let's make sure everybody else knows that our cocoa has no additives. They go to the government and say, everybody needs to list their ingredients. And their only ingredient is cocoa and squish a machine. That's it. We've got an hydraulic press. All we're putting in our cocoa is cocoa beans. What are you guys putting in yours? And the government tell round trees and fries and tailors they have to list their ingredients and oh, it's embarrassing.

They're not just pure, their stuff's got other things in it. Perfectly good things. But other things. But yeah, makes it not look as good. Exactly. Adulteration of Food Acts, 1872 and 1875. So this is very clever from Cadbury because they basically have used the government department to sell chocolate.

And we've also got the Swiss chocolatier Daniel Petter to thank for milk chocolate. And we've got Mr Henri Nestle. He invented milk powder, which then went into it as well. And we have Rudolf Lindt. So there's some names coming up here. Isn't it amazing how the names stayed the same? Rudolf Lindt invents the conching process, which gives you extra smooth milk chocolate, doesn't it? Chocolate is acidic.

And by stirring it for hours and hours and hours on end, some of those vinegars and volatiles evaporate so this was huge completely changes the chocolate so when was the first time someone made a milk chocolate bar which presumably is when the industry we know today really took off 1875 daniel peter he spent seven years trying to perfect a recipe because up until that point, any time anyone had added milk to chocolate, it had just sort of curdled because it's got too much water in it. And he spent ages and ages and ages. Finally, the factory next door, which was the Nestle factory where they made powdered milk. One of the workers suggested to one of his workers, why don't you just add our milk?

And they had a go. And that was it. That was the first time milk chocolate was made. So it was actually a worker from a powdered milk factory is the person who invented milk chocolate. We don't know that person's name, I presume. No, and Daniel Peter is always credited. It was one of the workers. Working class hero. Yeah. So the Swiss come up with milk chocolate, that then comes into the UK and Cadbury's attempt to try and corner that marketplace is, of course, dairy milk,

which we know launched in which year, Richard? I am going to say 1904. You're so close. So close. 1905. 1905. That's really impressive, actually. They very nearly called it something else, though.

They very nearly called it dairy-made. Oh, that's quite nice. But there was a grocer's daughter in Plymouth who said, no, dairy milk's better. And they went, all right. Again, another of the unsung heroes. Unsung hero, yeah. that's quite nice. But there was a grocer's daughter in Plymouth who said, no, dairy milk's better. And they made it all right. Again, another of the unsung heroes. Unsung hero, yeah. That's milk chocolate. When did white chocolate come in?

1937. Oh, quite late then. It is quite late. And it was invented as a medicine in Switzerland in the 30s. For children who'd been in hospital with a serious illness like TB or something and had lost a lot of weight, they wanted to be able to give them a vitamin-enriched milk to drink. But children rejected the milk because they said drinking milk was babyish.

And so somebody said, can we make it into something that they can eat so that they'll consume these vitamins and minerals? And someone said, well, we can whack some cocoa butter in it. And they accidentally invented white chocolate. And then this white chocolate vitamin-enriched thing, which was called a nestro vit was was so popular and the nestro vit is still available mainly on the continent this it was so popular they said you know we've got to make this into a brand and they gave it the catch name of

galak and it was going to be made in 1937 for the first time in switzerland and london respectively and the l the London people wrote to the Swiss people and said, we cannot call it Galak. It sounds wrong. And they said, well, what do you want to call it? Milky Bar. Isn't it amazing in the history of all these things? You see it in the history of crisps as well. Often the very first

movers and the very first bars just still exist and they're still the one, you know, so it's not like there were 30 white chocolate bars before someone came up with the Milky Bar. You know, it's the Milky Bar and they're still the one, you know. So it's not like there were 30 white chocolate bars before someone came up with the Milky Bar. You know, it's the Milky Bar and then it remains the Milky Bar for the rest of time. Well, speaking of that, actually, I've got a little list here, actually.

1920s, you've got the Cream Egg, which fries, then Cadbury's later on. The Flake, the Fruit and Nut and the Crunchy Bar, all 1920s. I mean, but things to me like the Flake and the Crunchy seems like things they should be inventing now. 1933, we've got an American chocolatier called Forrest Mars. Oh, yes, see. And he comes up, of course, with the Forrest bar.

Sorry, I mean the Mars bar. And Milky Way in 1935 and Maltesers in 36. And then the Round Trees Company launched the Kit Kat in 35. Then the Aero, Smarties in 37. But all in that sort of that kind of 15 year period. So many of the things That we still see In our newsagents now It's a golden age

We're all invented right Yeah Isn't it incredible I would say to any audience Of people who are kind of my age Late 40s You say Here's a way to make money

Ask anyone my age I bet you £10 You don't know what Snickers Was originally called And they all go They all go Okay it's Marathon They go no no no

It was Snickers It was originally Snickers Oh really Named after Forrest Mars' horse This is right right OK, it's Marathon. They go, no, no, no, it was Snickers. It was originally Snickers. Oh, really? It was named after Forrest Mars' horse. This is right, right? And they renamed it Marathon over here in the 70s because they were pretending it was a health bar. Oh, wow.

And then they, of course, rebranded it Snickers because it's the same all over the world. But it was originally Snickers. So, of course, as you know, the Mars bar wasn't invented by Forrest Mars. It was invented by his dad. There was a huge falling out. His dad said, look, America isn't big enough for the both of us.

Have Europe. And so then they started making the same products but with different names on different continents. So they have the Three Musketeers, which I think is our Milky Way. This is one of those things where I need an infographic or a map or something to work out which one is which. But the reason that they had different names was because there was a massive family feud. Can we just talk a little bit about the Quakers as

employers? Because famously there's a thing called garden factories or garden cities, which are not Zach Braff movies, but they are essentially communities that are built from scratch to make chocolate. Well, the garden city and garden town movement was something that was

already happening in the UK, well in Garden City is a great example. There were lots of people at the time who said, you know what, if we're going to start building somewhere for people to live, let's plan it in advance to make it nice. The Cadbury's said, well what about factories? We could have garden factories. Let's have tennis courts, lunchtime tennis games. Cadbury's bought some land. They built a huge

factory complex and made a factory in a garden. And then they also decided to make a village or a town, which is Bourneville, and made some really, really beautiful houses and made them affordable as well. And then Roundtree's said, look, go big or go home. Can we solve the problem of slums, sickness, poverty and general misery? And everybody said no. And they said, well, we're still going to try. And they set up a charity to do scientific investigations and research into the root causes of poverty. And then to put all of that research into the creation of a housing estate. And they have the village of New Earswick in York and then a whole lot of other villages around the country that they've started creating based on their researches.

Because they said, well, Cadbury's might have a very nice town, but we're being scientific and we're trying to do something bigger and grander. I seem to remember from my sociology degree that the Rowntree Report was the big report into poverty in Britain. There were multiple reports. So Benjamin Seabone Rowntree's initial report in the multiple reports the multiple reports so um benjamin seabone roundtree's initial report in the late 1890s poverty a study of town life where he got social workers to investigate the root causes of poverty by interviewing every single family in the town

that didn't have a servant he was interviewing over 11 000 families it was more than 70 000 people and the charity that he and his father set up continues to this day doing amazing work because frankly they were never as successful in business as the cabris and the cabris were their cousins they were all related to the cabris they were related to the cabris one of the round trees arnold round tree known as chocolate jumbo he lived with his auntie he lived with his auntie he was a cabri for years. And the round trees, I think, had a little bit of a chip on their shoulder about how these cabarets... Chocolate chip. Indeed, they had a chocolate chip on their shoulder. Cabarets swanning around with all their fancy money and their fancy garden factories.

So they would copy them, but they would also try to look as though they were doing something slightly grander. I read something, you'll tell me the truth of this or not. I was reading something about round trees in the very early days when cabarets were going gangbusters, and round trees almost went out of business until a French guy walked into the office of Joseph Roundtree. Is this a true story? Oh, yes, and also round trees were always almost going out of business.

But anyway, back in the 1860s, Henry Isaac Roundtree, he's bought up this cocoa factory, but he really wanted to be just a kind of comedy blogger. So he was, instead of running this cocoa factory, he was writing a newspaper full of all of his own opinions, getting his staff to sell it around the town and making a huge loss. So his brother, Joseph Rowntree, has to take over the business. And then this Frenchman turns up at the door,e Claude Gaget and he wants to show them his pastilles yes it's true fruit pastilles I love fruit pastilles as well well this Frenchman he's making French pastilles at the time only the French made pastilles he says can I sell you my

pastilles would you like to buy them and Joseph Rowntree says no but I will buy you would you like to work here and make pastilles for me? And what I love about this story, so you'd think that he would make them, a week later they'd be in the shops. August, of course, says, yes, I'll move here, I'll live in York, I'll make you pastilles. Spends two years making recipes of pastilles and taking them to Joseph Rowntree and saying,

what do you think? They're perfect, they're wonderful. And Joseph would say, they're very good, but I think you can do a little better. Go away and try again. He keeps doing this for two years. He keeps going away and trying again. you can do a little better. Go away and try again. He keeps doing this for two years. He keeps going away and trying again. You can do a little better.

Go away and try again. Paying this guy a salary the whole time. Finally, he went back to Joseph Roundtree. He said, look, these are the best past deals I'm ever going to make. I've made a ton of them. The traveling salesmen are outside and ready. I can hand them to them. They can go and they can take them.

They're perfect. They're never going to get any better. These are my past deals. And Joseph Roundtree tries them. He says, they're very, very good. But I still think you could do a little better. Rather than give them to the salesman, I think I'd prefer that you threw them in the river ooze.

Have another go. See, try again. And he tried again. And eventually he created Roundtree's pastilles and then Roundtree's fruit gums. This is all very lovely. We should bring it all down with a horrible scandal in 1908 where it was found that British companies were using cacao

grown by slaves in the Portuguese chocolate islands. Slavery had been abolished in 1833 and yet still this was being... And they were Quaker firms. Behind the scenes, the Quakers knew and they were trying to work with people on the ground to expose it and they were also trying to protect some people who they knew were there at the time. There is no easy way to talk about Quakers and slavery, is there?

That's the interesting thing is for us they feel oppositional. Like, Quakers are nice people who do nice things. So they were exposed by a newspaper. They decided to sue the newspaper and say, you know, we were working on this. We're not bad people. And the judge said, all right, I find in favour of the Quakers, the newspaper have to pay you damages of a shilling.

Oh, OK. It was a terrible scandal that had a huge impact on the Roundtree family because then they said, well, we just need to buy our own plantations and run them ourselves. And so they bought plantations and they had great ideals and they were horribly unsuccessful and they used them to grow lemons instead. 1914, the First World War breaks out and this is a disaster if you're trying to make dairy milk. Do you want to guess why?

Presumably, you couldn't get the sugar across the Atlantic. The milk is the main issue. Oh, really? Yeah. We can get milk in the UK, can't we? But it's going to the soldiers. It's the war, man. The war. So dairy milk sort of stops know, it's the war, man. The war.

So dairy milk sort of stops getting produced because essentially the war takes over. And then into war years, you get the 20s and 30s, the golden era of all our favourite chocolate brands. And then Second World War again, and it happens again. At the start of the Second World War, round trees realised that they couldn't keep making Kit Kat with milk. There were milk shortages. Milk needed to be put into powdered milk to stockpile. And so they changed the recipe. they made a plain chocolate Kit Kat and they wanted it to be obvious

to the consumers that they knew this was different and so it had a blue wrapper and they changed the name slightly before the war Kit Kat was known as chocolate crisp and Kit Kat was just a nickname in the corner of the the label and during the second world war they made this blue label and in big capital letters kit kat the chocolate crisp you know and love is unavailable until after the war is over and this is a temporary solution and they were very very clear about it and it only lasted for uh maybe nine ten months and then they had to just stop altogether because in the end round trees made munitions at their factory and the only chocolate they made was plain chocolate for soldiers rations however they were also making riveta

because the riveta factory had moved riveta production to york some of the employees missed kit kat and their children missed kit kat so they got hold of riveta cut it up got some of the um the old equipment to hand make kit kats and they handmade kit kats with ration chocolate from the ration chocolate plant the rye vita kit kat molds and made plain chocolate rye vita kit kats and still to this day i have people come to me when i'm doing like history talks to say why did nestle stop making the rye vita kit kats they're amazing and i have to say they didn't ever do it officially. Your parents were stealing from their employers. The nuance window!

Well, we've reached that point of the show where we need to hear from our expert. This is the famous nuance window where Richard and I, we have a break. We have a Kit Kat. And Alex takes two minutes to tell us something that we need to know. So, Alex, without much further ado, here we go. We have only scratched the surface of the history of chocolate, both on this show and as historians. There's so much we don't know and there's so much that we can still learn. New discoveries are being made all the time.

For instance, until recently, we were convinced that cocoa in Mesoamerica was for noble households and warriors. And it's not only ancient history that's coming to light. There's work to do in more recent records. So for instance, just in the last few years, the secret Roundtree board minutes, which have been closed to the public for over 100 years, have been released to researchers. And I don't think any researchers have tried to look at them yet, because I don't know that they've been released and they're at the Borthwick Institute at the University of York and they're full of secrets behind big brands like Kit Kat and Smarties and Aero but there's a problem we don't have enough chocolate historians there aren't enough chocolate historians to dig

through this material now is chocolate history a worthwhile topic of course it is it's now being discovered that chocolate can do for our health. There are so many huge potential benefits to human beings. For instance, there's been research in Japan that strongly suggests that the polyphenols in cocoa work to suppress the genes which produce LDL cholesterol and activate the ones that produce HDL. So if you're a young person listening to this and you're thinking, what should I do with the rest of my life? Should I become a chocolate historian? No, no, that's ridiculous. It's not ridiculous. Join me.

In fact, I need to retire at some point and there's no one to take over from me. Could you be the next chocolate historian? I need an army of you. I'd like to offer you the opportunity to steal my job. Just gladly join me. I need chocolate historians. There's work to be done. Thank you so much. Can we get a TV show to find the next chocolate historian, Richard?

Can a 49-year-old quiz show host apply? So what do you know now? Well, on that note, it's time for the quiz. This is where we take our comedian and we put them to the test to see what they have learned. It's called the So What Do You Know Now. Richard, you love a quiz. I mean, you're famously a quiz master.

I do like a quiz. Let's see how you do. 60 seconds on the clock. Here we go. First question. The cacao plant's scientific name is Theobroma cacao. What does Theobroma mean? Food of the gods. Food of the gods. Which ancient civilization first give us the real evidence of chocolate drinking? The Maya. The Maya, correct. Name one of the ingredients Aztecs and Maya used to flavour their cold

or hot drinking chocolate. Chilli. Yes, or you have vanilla or honey or flower petals. In 1585, the first officially recorded shipment of cacao beans arrives in which Spanish city? Seville. Seville is correct. Why was chocolate at the centre of a great debate between medieval monks? Whether it was food

or a drink. Yes, for fasting. Question six. Fearing they were hotbeds of sedition and treason, which 17th century monarch attempted to ban chocolate houses? Charles the... Charles. Charles the... First. Second. Oh, nearly. Question seven. Big British chocolate companies in the 18th and 19th

centuries were dominated by which faith group? The Quakers. The Quakers. Question eight. Why did Cadbury lobby the government about food safety standards in the 1870s? Because they were just using cocoa in their powder. That's right. They wanted other people to look bad. Question nine.

Why was chocolate discontinued during the World Wars? Because milk was needed for the war effort. Absolutely. And final question. Which company originally made the cream egg? It was Fry's. It was Fry's. Time's up.

You scored nine out of 10, which is very commendable. Thank you. You almost got a 10 there. You had Charles, and I was like... I should have remembered because you said his dad

had his head chopped off. Yeah, yeah. I would have to think. 9 out of 10 is very commendable. Well done. I mean, are you happy with that score? Very happy with the entire experience.

It's been fascinating. Thank you, Alex. It's been absolutely amazing. Thanks for having me. Lovely. Well, that's all we have time for. I hope you've learned lots on this Whistle Stop Factory tour of the history of chocolate. I feel a little bit sick from factual overindulgence, but I'm sure tomorrow I'll come back for plenty more.

If you've enjoyed today's podcast, please do share it with your friends or leave a review online. Make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me so you never miss an episode. It's on BBC Sounds. But for now, let me say a huge thank you to our brilliant guests. In History Corner, the marvellous chocolate historian, Alex Hutchinson. Thank you, Alex. Thank you for having me. And in Comedy Corner, the delicious Richard Osman. Thank you. Been nothing but a pleasure. Thank you, Graham.

And to you, dear listeners, join me next time when we'll take another nibble out of history with two completely different study buddies. And if you want to hear more about South American history, check out our previous Aztec episodes on BBC Sounds. But for now, I'm off to report Willy Wonka to the authorities. That man should not be around children. Bye! You're Dead to Me was a Muddy Knees media production for BBC Radio 4. The researcher was Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow.

The script was by Emma Naguse. The project manager was Isla Matthews. The producer was Brian O'Toole. And the editor was Cornelius Mendes. From the one village behind the mountain. Imagine you're living a very different life on the other side of the world. You feel I cannot do anything. You live silently in the shadows.

Just stay home, bring children, make food. And then someone takes your child, disappears into the night with your little girl, and you can't stay silent any longer. And look after this child like tigers. Just go everywhere. Join me, Sue Mitchell, for this gripping new BBC Radio 4 podcast series Subscribe to Girl Taken on BBC Sounds