History of Chocolate

Chocolate is one of the most popular foods on Earth, and people eat millions of tons of it every year. Yet for most of its history, nobody ate chocolate at all. People drank it.

巧克力是世界上最受欢迎的食物之一，人们每年要吃掉数百万吨。然而在它的大部分历史里，根本没有人“吃”巧克力。人们是把它当饮料喝的。

It started as a bitter, spicy drink in ancient Mexico and Central America, and it took more than three thousand years to become the sweet bar we find in every supermarket. Along the way it passed through temples, royal courts, London clubs and Swiss factories.

它最初是古代墨西哥和中美洲的一种又苦又辣的饮料，经过三千多年，才变成今天每家超市都能买到的甜巧克力块。一路上，它走进过神庙、王宫、伦敦的俱乐部和瑞士的工厂。

The cacao tree's scientific name, Theobroma cacao, comes from Greek and means "food of the gods." The Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus gave it that name in 1753. The tree first grew wild in the upper Amazon in South America, and the oldest known traces of cacao, found on pottery in Ecuador, are about 5,300 years old.

可可树的学名Theobroma cacao来自希腊语，意思是“众神的食物”。这个名字是瑞典科学家卡尔·林奈在1753年起的。可可树最早野生于南美洲的亚马孙河上游地区，目前已知最古老的可可痕迹是在厄瓜多尔的陶器上发现的，距今约5300年。

In Mexico and Central America, people were using cacao by around 1500 BCE, among them the Olmecs of southern Mexico. The earliest drinks may have been made not from the beans but from the sweet white pulp around them, which was left to ferment into a mildly alcoholic drink.

在墨西哥和中美洲，人们大约在公元前1500年就已经开始使用可可，其中包括墨西哥南部的奥尔梅克人。最早的饮料可能不是用可可豆做的，而是用包裹着可可豆的白色甜果肉。人们让果肉发酵，做成一种略带酒精的饮料。

For the Maya, cacao was sacred. They painted cacao trees in their art, placed cacao vessels in royal tombs, and told stories in which the gods gave the plant to humans. They called it kakaw. To make their drink, they ground roasted beans and mixed them with water, chili and cornmeal, then poured the liquid from one pot into another to create a thick foam.

对玛雅人来说，可可是神圣的。他们在艺术作品中描绘可可树，把盛可可的器皿放进王室墓葬，还流传着众神把这种植物赐给人类的故事。他们把可可叫作kakaw。制作饮料时，他们把烘烤过的可可豆磨碎，加入水、辣椒和玉米粉，然后把液体从一个容器倒进另一个容器，直到形成厚厚的泡沫。

The Aztecs lived in the dry highlands, where cacao could not grow, so they got their beans through trade and as tribute from conquered regions. Spanish writers claimed that Emperor Moctezuma drank huge amounts of it. Cacao beans also worked as money: a price list from 1545 says a turkey hen cost 100 beans.

阿兹特克人住在干燥的高原上，那里种不了可可，所以他们通过贸易获得可可豆，或者让被征服的地区作为贡品上缴。据西班牙作家记载，皇帝蒙特祖马喝下的可可饮料多得惊人。可可豆还可以当钱用：1545年的一份价目表写道，一只母火鸡值100颗可可豆。

Christopher Columbus saw cacao beans in 1502, on his fourth voyage, but paid little attention to them. Europeans only got to know chocolate after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1520s. A popular story says Hernán Cortés took beans home to the king around 1528, but the first recorded cacao in Spain arrived in 1544, as a gift from a group of Maya nobles to Prince Philip.

1502年，哥伦布在第四次航行中见到了可可豆，但并没有太在意。直到16世纪20年代西班牙征服墨西哥之后，欧洲人才真正认识了巧克力。一个流传很广的说法是，埃尔南·科尔特斯在1528年前后把可可豆带回去献给国王，但有文字记载的第一批可可是在1544年到达西班牙的，那是一群玛雅贵族送给菲利普王子的礼物。

At first many Spaniards found the bitter drink hard to like. They soon sweetened it with sugar and flavored it with cinnamon and vanilla, and it became fashionable among the nobility. For several decades chocolate remained mostly a Spanish taste. It reached Italy, France and England only in the 1600s.

起初，许多西班牙人喝不惯这种苦饮料。不久他们就开始加糖，再用肉桂和香草调味，于是它在贵族中流行起来。之后几十年里，巧克力基本上只是西班牙人的口味。直到17世纪，它才传到意大利、法国和英国。

London's first chocolate house opened in 1657, run by a Frenchman. Like the coffee houses of the time, these were places where people met to read the news, talk politics and do business. White's, which opened as a chocolate house in 1693, later became one of London's most exclusive gentlemen's clubs, and it still exists today.

伦敦第一家巧克力屋于1657年开张，老板是一个法国人。和当时的咖啡馆一样，人们在这里聚会、看新闻、谈政治、做生意。1693年作为巧克力屋开业的怀特俱乐部（White's），后来成为伦敦最高级的绅士俱乐部之一，至今仍在营业。

Chocolate remained a drink for the rich throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries. Cacao had to cross the Atlantic, it was heavily taxed, and grinding the beans by hand took hours. Most ordinary people never tasted a cup of hot chocolate in their lives.

整个17世纪和18世纪初，巧克力一直是有钱人的饮料。可可要漂洋过海运过大西洋，税很重，而且用手研磨可可豆要花好几个小时。大多数普通人一辈子都没喝过一杯热巧克力。

The big change came with machines. In 1828 the Dutch chocolate maker Coenraad van Houten patented a press that squeezed most of the fat, called cocoa butter, out of roasted cacao beans. What was left could be ground into a fine powder, cocoa, which mixed easily with water and was cheaper to produce.

真正的变化是机器带来的。1828年，荷兰巧克力制造商范豪滕为一种压榨机申请了专利。这种机器能把烘烤过的可可豆中的大部分油脂，也就是可可脂，压榨出来。剩下的部分可以磨成细粉，这就是可可粉。它很容易和水混合，生产成本也更低。

In 1847 the British company J. S. Fry & Sons mixed cocoa powder, sugar and melted cocoa butter into a paste that could be pressed into a mold. The first modern chocolate bar was born. In 1875 the Swiss chocolate maker Daniel Peter created milk chocolate, using condensed milk from his neighbor in Vevey, Henri Nestlé. Four years later Rodolphe Lindt invented the conche, a machine that stirred chocolate for days and finally made it smooth and creamy.

1847年，英国的J. S. Fry & Sons公司把可可粉、糖和融化的可可脂混合成一种可以压进模具的糊状物，第一块现代巧克力就这样诞生了。1875年，瑞士巧克力师丹尼尔·彼得用他在沃韦的邻居亨利·内斯特莱生产的炼乳，做出了牛奶巧克力。四年后，鲁道夫·林特发明了精磨机，这种机器能把巧克力连续搅拌好几天，终于让它变得细滑柔润。

Many brands that are still on supermarket shelves grew big in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Cadbury in England, Nestlé and Lindt in Switzerland, and Hershey in the United States. Milton Hershey went further than most. In 1903 he started building a factory in rural Pennsylvania, and around it a whole town for his workers, with houses, schools, a park and streetcars. The town is still called Hershey.

许多至今仍摆在超市货架上的品牌，都是在19世纪末到20世纪初发展壮大的：英国的吉百利，瑞士的雀巢和瑞士莲，还有美国的好时。米尔顿·好时走得比大多数人都远。1903年，他开始在宾夕法尼亚州的乡村建工厂，并在工厂周围为工人建起一整座小镇，有住房、学校、公园和有轨电车。这座小镇至今仍叫好时镇。

These companies spent heavily on advertising and attractive packaging, and boxes of chocolates became a popular gift. In both world wars, soldiers carried chocolate as emergency food. By the 1950s, chocolate had changed from a rare luxury into an everyday treat that almost anyone in Europe or North America could afford.

这些公司在广告和精美包装上花了大量资金，盒装巧克力成了很受欢迎的礼物。在两次世界大战中，士兵都随身携带巧克力作为应急口粮。到了20世纪50年代，巧克力已经从稀有的奢侈品变成了日常零食，在欧洲和北美几乎人人都买得起。

Dark chocolate has a high percentage of cacao and little or no milk, which makes it more bitter. It is also the richest in flavonoids, plant compounds that act as antioxidants. Milk chocolate contains milk powder or condensed milk, so it tastes sweeter and creamier, and it usually has much less cacao.

黑巧克力的可可含量高，牛奶很少或者完全没有，所以味道更苦。它的类黄酮含量也最高。类黄酮是一类具有抗氧化作用的植物化合物。牛奶巧克力含有奶粉或炼乳，所以更甜、更顺滑，可可含量通常也低得多。

White chocolate contains cocoa butter, sugar and milk, but none of the dark cocoa solids. That is why it is pale and very sweet, and why some people say it is not real chocolate at all. The newest type is ruby chocolate, introduced by the Swiss company Barry Callebaut in 2017. It is pink without any added color, and the company has never fully explained how it is made.

白巧克力含有可可脂、糖和牛奶，但不含深色的可可固形物。这就是它颜色浅、味道很甜的原因，也是有些人说它根本不算真正巧克力的原因。最新的品种是红宝石巧克力，由瑞士公司百乐嘉利宝在2017年推出。它不加任何色素就是粉红色的，而公司从未完全公开它的制作方法。

People have argued about chocolate and health for centuries. The Aztecs used cacao in medicines, for example against tiredness, and in 17th-century Europe doctors debated whether the new drink was good or bad for the body.

几百年来，人们一直在争论巧克力对健康是好是坏。阿兹特克人把可可用在药物里，比如用来缓解疲劳；而在17世纪的欧洲，医生们争论这种新饮料对身体到底有益还是有害。

Today most research focuses on flavonoids, which are found mainly in dark chocolate. Some studies have linked small amounts of dark chocolate to slightly lower blood pressure and better blood flow. But most chocolate bars are also full of sugar and fat, which can cancel out these benefits, so a small piece is a better choice than a whole bar.

如今，大多数研究都集中在类黄酮上，它主要存在于黑巧克力中。一些研究发现，吃少量黑巧克力与血压略有下降、血液循环改善有关。但大多数巧克力也含有大量的糖和脂肪，可能抵消这些好处，所以吃一小块比吃一整块要好。

Chocolate also has a darker history. From the 1600s on, enslaved Africans worked on cacao plantations in Venezuela, Brazil and the Caribbean. Even in the early 1900s, workers on the Portuguese islands of São Tomé and Príncipe lived almost like slaves, and in 1909 Cadbury stopped buying cacao from there after reports exposed the conditions.

巧克力也有一段更黑暗的历史。从17世纪起，被奴役的非洲人就在委内瑞拉、巴西和加勒比地区的可可种植园里劳动。直到20世纪初，葡萄牙属地圣多美和普林西比岛上的工人仍然过着近乎奴隶的生活。1909年，在相关报告揭露了那里的情况之后，吉百利停止从那里购买可可。

Problems remain today. About 60 percent of the world's cacao comes from just two West African countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana, where many farmers earn very little. A 2020 study estimated that more than 1.5 million children were working on cacao farms in these two countries. Fair-trade labels and company programs try to improve pay and conditions, but progress has been slow.

这些问题至今仍然存在。全世界大约60%的可可只来自西非的两个国家：科特迪瓦和加纳，那里的许多农民收入非常低。2020年的一项研究估计，这两个国家有150多万名儿童在可可农场干活。公平贸易标签和企业项目都在努力改善收入和工作条件，但进展缓慢。

Chocolate began as a sacred drink in ancient Mexico and Central America, and today it is a global industry worth more than 100 billion dollars a year. On the way it crossed the Atlantic, made great fortunes in Europe and America, and caused great suffering on plantations.

巧克力最初是古代墨西哥和中美洲的一种神圣饮料，如今已成为年产值超过1000亿美元的全球产业。一路上，它跨越了大西洋，在欧洲和美洲成就了巨大的财富，也在种植园里造成了深重的苦难。

Every bar in a supermarket carries a piece of that history: the foam of the Maya, Spanish sugar, a Dutch press, Swiss milk and, too often, the work of poorly paid farmers in West Africa.

超市里的每一块巧克力都带着这段历史的一部分：玛雅人的泡沫、西班牙的糖、荷兰的压榨机、瑞士的牛奶，还有太多时候，西非低收入农民的劳动。