In various novels I’ve read set in 18th Century Europe – Barry Lyndon, A Tale of Two Cities, Barnaby Rudge – it appears chocolate is the favorite non-alcoholic beverage of the gentry and nobility, much more popular (especially as a breakfast drink) than tea or coffee. But I’ve never read it mentioned in novel set in the 19th Century or later. Nowadays in America, hot chocolate is mainly a warming-drink (and especially a treat for children) served only in the coldest weather and at ski lodges. I suppose it is the same in Europe. How and when and why did drinkable chocolate so fall from grace?
Yoo hoo!
Not sure, though it is very commonly drunk in mexico, and germany by adults, and at least half the adults in the dining room of the hotel I stayed in in Angers were not just drinking chocolate but having bread and butter with chocolate shavings for breakfast…
I should hope so, the Mexicans invented it! But do they drink it hot, like coffee? Or cold or room-temperature?
Well, up until recently, the only way to consume chocolate was as a drink. Solid chocolate bars are a pretty recent invention. Perhaps eating chocolate supplanted drinking chocolate as the ingestion method of choice.
Up until the late 18th/early 19th century to be precise.
Seems like we still drink plenty of chocolate, albeit it different form (chocolate milk, etc.). AFAIK, the indigenous people in Mexico still drink it. I can buy a form of it from the Mexican lady who operates a food stall at the local farmer’s market. She says it’s still popular where she comes from.
Hot chocolate in Spain is a lot like drinking pure, unfiltered chocolate. It’s one of the most sinfully delicious things on Earth.
Starbucks released a drinking chocolate product called Chantico like 3 years ago, and it failed miserably. I would have thought that if anyone would embrace such a product it would be us Americans, but it just never caught on.
I have to point out that the chocolate people used to drink was a very different thing from our modern hot chocolate or Yoo Hoo. The original name for the drink among the Indians who invented it, I’ve been told, was “the bitter drink”. They didn’t sweeten it. Chocolate used in non-dessert cooking isn’t sweetened either (I had a co-worker whose wife used to make him bitter chocolate over rice. That Break with Chocolate Shavings might not have been sweetened, either.)
And so it was with Europeans. Originally, chocolate liquor wasn’t necessarily sweetened. I get the impression that people drank it like coffee or tea, maybe with a little sugar in it. Or it was added to coffee to make mocha.
Why the drinking of a relatively sugarless chopcolate beverage fell out of favor, I don’t know. Certainly it’s happened with other drinks. The English used to drink sack-and-sugar, a very heavily sugared wine (which didn’t help their teeth). Certainly folks on this board have discussed the various fermented beverages like mead and its relatives that aren’t exactly common these days. And in colonial days and the 19th century kids drank “shrub” before there was Hi-C and Kool-Aid.
How would one make it? I’ve got a tin of Nestle’s “unsweetened cocoa” (I sometimes use it as a chili ingredient), which as I understand it is simply the pure original stuff out of which all chocolate beverages, candies, ice cream, cakes, etc., are made. If I just add that to hot water, have I got Spanish chocolate? Or is milk required? And do the Spaniards drink it sweetened or unsweetened?
Shame, too - it was delicious!
Try this. You can probably buy the churros. I know you can in CA.
This may depend on where in Spain you are, or maybe it’s just that my concept of “pure chocolate” is somewhat different.
What I was served in Andalucia (Seville, to be specific) could best be described as warm chocolate pudding. It was thick and cloyingly sweet, and both times I gave it a try I could only finish half the small cup before it got to be too much. Give me the Mexican stuff anyday… slightly spicy and not very sweet at all.
(oh, and hot chocolate is my evening beverage of choice when the weather is yucky… I made some last night, in fact)
Gotta build up that chocotolerance.
I’m going to have to agree. I think I’m going to run to the store and pick up some right now, actually.
Eewww, Nestle. First, toss it out and go get a real chocolate (surprisingly hard to find in America.) Order online if you have to. John Mace provided a good link for how to make it.
Ha. I’m surprised at the fact that I don’t sweat chocolate on some days. 
I really do eat THAT much of it.
My preference is for bittersweet, however, whilst the chocolate than was served with my morning churros was more along the lines of milk chocolate in both intensity and sweetness. Not my bag.
Damn Yoo-Hoo.
OVALTINE!
Was it sweet or unsweetened?
Actually (I just looked in the pantry) it’s Hershey’s. But, look, we’re talking about pure cocoa powder here – it’s like sugar or salt or flour; why should the manufacturer make a difference?
Drinking chocolate is making a small comeback. I had some in the Napa Valley about a year ago, and there is now a place right here in Anchorage where you can buy a steaming cup of 62% chocolate, flavored or not, spiked with chile pepper or not. It’s terrific stuff and will put you right into a coma in no time.