Chocolate: A Brief History
Taught by Andrea Booth
Andrea spends much of her time, talking, thinking, dreaming and writing about food. Her love affair with all things culinary began in southern France where she lived for 7 years and worked at a gourmet chocolate company. Her favorite place to visit when she first arrives in a country is the local grocery store. She loves to make eccentric flavored ice creams for her friends and insists that having chocolate for breakfast is completely acceptable and to be encouraged.
One of the things I find ceaselessly fascinating is how certain foods came to be created. Chocolate is a perfect example of this. It’s as if someone considered the seeds of a papaya and thought… how can I make something truly amazing out of these… something the whole world will crave, priests will fast on, and children will fight over?
The cacao pod, in its ripe state, provides no hint of the delicious chocolaty aromas and textures locked within its seeds. Over time, people somehow figured out that when you ferment, dry, roast, crack, winnow, grind, refine, conch, temper and mold these magical beans, you end up with the classic chocolate bar.
Come join us as we explore how chocolate as we know it came to be made, who were the key players, why the Spanish tried to hoard it from the rest of the world for almost 100 years, who the big names in chocolate are today, and many more interesting facts.
And once your intellectual taste buds have been satisfied, we are going to put you to work with a little tasting experiment comparing different single-origin bars (don’t know what that means? Fret not, it will all be explained!). And if you’re feeling daring, you can wash down your chocolate with an ancient recipe passed down to us by the Aztecs.
