Chocolate Sarah Moss (best fantasy books to read .txt) 📖

in the century. In Britain, the firm of J. S. Fry & Sons pioneered the creation of a solid chocolate by pressing out and then reintroducing some of the cocoa butter. The result was more moist than the solid pastilles which had been sold until then, but remained somewhat gritty and was not very popular. Swiss manufacturers were also experimentingwith ways to produce solid chocolate confections more cheaply and palatably to meet the expanding demand. Small merchants, whose names are well-known firms or brands now such as François-Louis Cailler (whose name now graces Nestlé’s quality range) and Philippe Suchard (another enduring industry name), began to perfect mechanical processes for grinding and mixing superior chocolate. The great Swiss breakthroughs came in 1879. One of them was the invention of milk chocolate in the form we know it now. Cailler’s son-in-law and heir in the chocolate business, Daniel Peter, devised a system for combining the powdered milk recently invented by his countryman Henri Nestlé with chocolate (Nestlé bought the Cailler, Peter, Kohler firm in 1929). The result, which also utilized cocoa butter, formed an easily moulded solid. Independently, Rodolphe Lindt came up with a mechanical process known as ‘conching’, in which granite rollers manipulate the chocolate liquor, mixing and heating it gently, resulting in a smooth mass and better flavour. This resulted in the sort of chocolate with which we are now familiar – a smooth-grained solid substance for eating – and made Lindt’s fortunes; to this day, Lindt & Sprüngli are an independent and well-known firm. Many other firms soon picked up the technique – that is, purchased the machine – and slowly the new form diffused. Both of these forms also came up with a use for cocoa butter, which is reintroduced once it is pressed out. It was this use, and later on its many other commercial uses, that made van Houten’s inventions transformative. As one part of a battery of machines, the cacao press took its place in the steadily diffusing and rapidly standardizing process of chocolate manufacture.

At this point, late in the nineteenth century, chocolate took on the finished forms, either as solid bar or as covering for other confections, we know best today. The same is true of the manufacturing processes that nearly all large-scale manufacturers follow to the present day. By the turn of the century, each step of the process was almost entirely mechanized. The first steps of chocolate manufacture are roughly the same as those that had always been used in preparing it: the beans are sorted and cleaned, and then put in large rotating roaster ovens that roast them slowly, both to develop the flavour and aroma and to make shelling easier. The roasted pieces are broken coarsely and hard bits of germimated bean and the pieces of shell are sieved and winnowed away respectively. The remaining beans, or nibs, are then ground more thoroughly. The friction of the grinding produces enough heat to melt the cocoa butter so that not a dry powder but rather a liquid paste, known as cocoa mass, is produced. It was essentially this mass, mixed with sugar and cooled again into a solid cake for making drinking chocolate, that was sold throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In the modern process, the mass is then put into a press like that developed by van Houten, where the lemon-yellow cacao butter flows out. The resulting hard cake (‘if one were banged on a man’s head it would probably stun him’ said a description from 1920) is then re-ground (and possibly ‘Dutched’) for processing into cocoa powder, or it is moved into chocolate production. For making chocolate, the pressed cake is recombined with sugar, traditionally in a mélangeur like that developed by Suchard in 1826, which is two heavy granite millstones which sit in a revolving granite basin. This sweetened mixture is then recombined with some cocoa butter or with other fats, vanilla, milk powder and whatever other ingredients are to be added and passed through a series of rollers which mill the particles into ever-finer granules. The only major innovation in the process that has happened since this era came after the Second World War with the addition of lecithin, an emulsifier made either from eggs or more often from soy. It is added both to cocoa and chocolate to improve blending and texture. The final step is conching, the process developed by Rodolphe Lindt. This process, which according to connoisseurs should take at least three days, often now takes place in hours. Finally, the chocolate, which up until this point has been kept at about 65–70°C, is moulded and tempered, that is, cooled quickly to about 40°C in order to force the cocoa butter to form crystal structures that will resist melting.

Conching machine, based on the 1876 invention by Rodolphe Lindt.

While chocolate took on its familiar forms just over a century ago, it was some time before these forms became widespread through all parts of society. It was not until nearly the turn of the century that a chocolate bar was affordable for the working classes in Belgium, for example. Cocoa, by contrast, became affordable and increasingly was seen as a nutritious foodstuff and meal replacement. As early as 1780 the British government had commissioned from thefirm of J. S. Fry & Sons a standard ration of chocolate (in the form of solidified cocoa mass as described above) for seamen in the Royal Navy as a nutritious food source and alternative to rum. Fry’s proudly referred to this naval connection in their advertising for many years. By the time of the First and Second World Wars, chocolate had completed its march to a mass-produced standard-issue foodstuff, and national firms proudly and patriotically (and of course lucratively) contributed it to the standard rations of the armed forces on all sides. Already in the First, but particularly during the Second World War, such chocolate rations were used symbolically to turn soldiers from all sides