History of chocolate

Healthy calories

To understand why an exhibition on the history of chocolate is being held in the unlikely venue of the Chelse Physic Garden in London, you need to bear in mind the 17th-century approach to medicine. It was almost the reverse of current practice. Today vast sums are poured into formulating treatments for old and new diseases. Three hundred years ago, as European explorers came back from distant lands bearing fragrant and exotic substances, the aim of medical entrepreneurs was to identify ailments for which these strange imports could plausibly be touted as a cure.

When the brown chocolate bean was introduced into Britain from Mexico and the American colonies it was at tint made into a drink, with supposed - if ill-defined -medical qualities. The self-indulgent chocolate bar came later; the after-dinner mint later still.

[ 1 ] Sloane was a towering figure in Georgian London, a driving force behind the establishment of the British Museum as well as a landowner whose name lives on in some of the capital's most fashionable streets and squares. Less appreciated is his contribution to the development of a national addiction: the average Briton chomps through 8kg (nearly 181b) of chocolate a year, consumption exceeded only by the Swiss.

In 1687 young Sloane sailed to Jamaica to become physician to the colonial governor, and noticed that the local women administered chocolate to their sick children. [ 2 ]

Like other mysteriously alluring substances, chocolate has from time to time been regarded as an aphrodisiac. Montezurna, the early 16th-century Aztec ruler, was reputed to consume up to 50 cups a day before repairing to his harem. His conqueror, Hernando Cortes, asserted in 1528 that a single cup enabled a warrior to go all day without food.

Casanova was said to find chocolate more effective for his purposes than champagne; and cheaper to boot. [ 3 ] In Britain, though, it is often taken as a soothing bedtime drink, an aid to slumber rather than seduction – suggesting that its effects may be as much imagined as real. A prolific 17th-century letter-writer, Madame de Sevigne, complai­ned that it once provoked a 16-hour attack of colic and constipation, but she learned to love it in the end.

Today, when almost every pleasure is identified as addictive, a name has been coined for those unfortunates who cannot get enough of the stuff: chocoholics. [ 4 ]

Not everybody's metabolism is so benign. Because of its fat and sugar content, chocolate is usually an enemy of slender elegance. Hence the guilt invariably associated with the dark, melting temptress - and hence the ambivalent title of the exhibition that runs at the Chelsea Physic Garden until September 7th: "Vice or Virtue?"

A Brillat-Savarin, a 19th-century gourmet, also recom­mended it as a stimulant.

B Returning to London two years later, he experimented with his milk recipe and, having perfected it, sold it to a Soho grocer, whose successors sold it on to Cadbury's.

C One victim of the condition may have been Katherine Hepburn, who boasted of eating a pound of chocolates a day but kept her sylph-like figure to her death.

D A second link with the Chelsea garden is that Sir Hans Sloane, its chief early benefactor, was a pioneer chocolate fancier, credited with dreaming up the idea of mixing the powdered bean with milk.