# Talk:History of chocolate

This article fails on just about every level, not to mention ignoring two of the most important parts of the history of chocolate: its controversial origins in the Olmec language and its medicinal use as outlined in the Aztec codices. —Viriditas | Talk 04:39, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm not in agreement that those are the most important things to include in this article about the history of chocolate, but if you've got the time, why not add what you know to the article instead of complaining about what you see as missing?  As for the olmec, since Cacao usage spread before the olmec, and apparently from south to north, I'm not sure the cacao linguistic data is all that interesting.  The article doesn't even begin to cover the interesting parts of precolumbian chocolate usage.  Where's the cacao beverage that intoxicates?  Where is cacao in ritual? and so forth. Rsheptak 23:25, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I noticed that there was some concern with the link to “Chocolate: Food of the Gods” I had added previously, so I am re-inserting it with the assurance that it is not spam, but a well-researched online exhibit through the reputable Cornell University Mann Library. The site provides a nice overview of the history of chocolate from the original drink of the Aztecs to the innovation of the solid sweet we know today. In addition to this cursory history, the site also has information about the cultivation of cocoa and the production of chocolate.--MannLib (talk) 13:20, 19 August 2008 (UTC)MannLib

Actually, I think the issue is that you represent the library that created and hosted it...that its a bit of self-promotion.  Well researched I guess is in the eye of the researcher.  The website is actually a somewhat outdated overview of a history of chocolate.  Ironically it fails to take into account the research into the origins of cacao use being done by your own Cornell faculty, John Henderson, for example.  See Precedings of the National Academy of Sciences for last November, and also check out the December Antiquity for more early chocoloate.  Rsheptak (talk) 23:07, 19 August 2008 (UTC) Cornell '77.

Perhaps someone with a more complete knowledge of this subject could beef up the first paragraph/summary? It seems to me to be sort of lacking in substance. 209.74.52.238 (talk) 15:13, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Here're some sites for a jumping-off point, if anyone feels so inclined:
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/Chocolate/history.html
http://www.chocolatelovers.com/history.htm
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blchocolate.htm
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/brief-history-of-chocolate.html
http://www.essortment.com/all/historychocolat_rywi.htm
WiiWillieWiki 14:11, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

In the Americas, chocolate was consumed in a bitter and very spicey drink called xocoatl, often seasoned with vanilla, chile pepper, and achiote
The first recorded shipment to Europe for commercial purposes was in a shipment from Veracruz to Sevilla in 1585. It was still served as a beverage, but the Europeans added sugar and milk to counteract the natural bitterness and removed the chilli pepper, replacing it with another Mexican indigenous spice, vanilla.
Lampak (talk) 17:45, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
Edit:

In the 1700s, mechanical mills were created that squeezed out cocoa butter
In 1828, Dutchman Coenraad Johannes van Houten patented a method for extracting the fat from cocoa beans and making powdered cocoa and cocoa butter
I can see some contradictions. Lampak (talk) 18:02, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

For hundreds of years, the chocolate making process remained unchanged. When the people saw the Industrial Revolution arrive, many changes occurred that brought the hard, sweet candy we love today to life. In the 1700s, mechanical mills were created that squeezed out cocoa butter, which in turn helped to create hard, durable chocolate.[16] But, it was not until the arrival of the Industrial Revolution that these mills were put to bigger use. Not long after the revolution cooled down, companies began advertising this new invention to sell many of the chocolate treats we see today.[17] When new machines were produced, people began experiencing and consuming chocolate worldwide.[18]
The second sentence contains a non-sequitur. Other sentences are not grammatically correct.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Danensis (talk • contribs) 13:06, 12 March 2009 (UTC) 
"Chocolate has a very long history, beginning with its discovery by ancient Mesoamerican civilizations over 3000 years ago."  Who wrote this? There was no discovery, can someone give proper attribution of this product to the ones who created it.

Can someone who can read whatever language Molina's dictionary is written in check the sources provided in this edit? The edit as a whole was a mess, so I went back to the last version, without the added commentary, and without the ridiculous formatting, however if someone can verify what the text says, then I will add the text back.--Terrillja talk 04:12, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Can you find "xocoatl" in The American Heritage Dictionary ? --Hello'work (talk) 04:29, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
The facts of the edit are correct.  The dictionary is a Nahuatl-Spanish(1571) and Spanish-Nahuatl(1555, revised 1571?) dictionary.  Molina says xocoatl means a beverage of ground corn and something else, and lists cacau atl as the word for a chocolate beverage.  Molina offers "xococ" as "agria", which today means "sour" but in the 16th century also included the sense of acid or bitter. I've put the full vocabulary pulled from Molina on Hello'work's Talk page in a comment. There's a much more developed chocolate/cacao vocabulary in Sahagun. What we should be consulting is the Remi Simeon dictionary, compiled from multiple sources.  Coe and Coe (1996) hypothesize that since cacau sounds like caca, the priests changed the word they used. Except as Dakin and Wichman point out, they kept using other words with the same initial sound. The "chocolate" -> "chocolatl" -> "xocolatl" -> "xocoatl" hypothesis seems to be the oldest of the speculations.  Rsheptak (talk) 17:52, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

There is a rather distracting confusion of tenses in the "Timeline" section. I'm not sure what the convension is on this point - I can't see anything in Wikipedia's Manual of Style, but I think it should be consistent...either refer to historical events in the past tense or the present tense, but not both.
82.3.144.140 (talk) 17:57, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Isn't Mesoamerica firmly in the 'West'? I think that maybe "Introduction to the rest of the world", or even "Introduction to Europe" would make more sense. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:31, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

I've now renamed the section as 'Introduction to the outside world'. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:32, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
Also, suggest moving section on introducing growing to Africa to the earlier history section; not sure why it’s not there already.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:645:C684:4BC0:78ED:8BCD:5DCF:5BD2 (talk) 23:53, 19 June 2025 (UTC) 

The article now reads: 

1830, The drink became a confection: Solid eating chocolate was developed by J. S. Fry & Sons, a British chocolate maker.
However, I could not find any reliable sources. The Chocolate article states the year they invented it to be 1847 (no source, either).
A recent work at the Dresden University of Technology found a chocolate bar from 1839 to be the first, but there's only a german source: (http://www.sz-online.de/nachrichten/artikel.asp?id=2919650) Is this enough to change the article?--The-tester (talk) 20:30, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Definitely. A German source is still reliable. I'll look for some sources too. -Uyvsdi (talk) 20:39, 23 November 2011 (UTC)Uyvsdi

At the beginning of the article it says:
"Briton John Cadbury developed an emulsification process to make solid chocolate creating the modern chocolate bar."
Further down in the timeline it says:
"1830, The drink became a confection: Solid eating chocolate was developed by J. S. Fry & Sons, a British chocolate maker."
So, which is it? Or are they talking about different things?
122.60.138.173 (talk) 04:13, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

Mitteldeutschland:Wer hats erfunden (german)
In England Fry brothers produced milk chocolate in 1847. But in Germany in Dresden German company Jordan & Timaeus producued milk chocolate already in 1839. 178.3.30.47 (talk) 01:35, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

And if it is Penthièvre's salon, why not add to caption instead of reverting? I think the image adds to the article and its historical dimension. People used to drink chocolate like this in those times. Hafspajen (talk) 10:42, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Good point - I was just checking to see if I could find another source than Wikipedia commons [1] to confirm who is in the picture, and the location - though it is all rather confusing, given the multiple names that the French aristocracy seem to have used for themselves. If Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, Duke of Penthièvre is the guy on the left, and this is "une famille à l'heure du chocolat", 1768, then it is presumably his only surviving daughter Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon in the middle - she would have been about 15 at the time. Your wikilinked 'Princess de Lamballe' leads to Princess Marie Louise of Savoy, who married the Duke's son Louis Alexandre, Prince of Lamballe - they are presumably the two behind the Duke and his daughter. As I say though, I'd prefer to find another source than Wikipedia for confirmation. When I do, I'll amend the caption. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:15, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Found confirmation - from "Portail des collections, des musées de France". [2] I'll amend the caption. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:33, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Quite so, here you got the image uploaded and the artists name in it. File:The Family of the Duke of Penthièvre.jpgHafspajen (talk) 14:44, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Your data are so old. Please update them.
http://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2013/09/14/nota/1439071/cacao-es-amazonico-se-consumia-hace-5500-anos-segun-arqueologos Spanish.
http://www.anepi.ec/content/leerVideos.php?id_post=317 English. 
And the cacao tree is not native from Central America. It's native from the Amazon.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.214.98.27 (talk) 08:00, 30 June 2014 (UTC) 

Here are some scientific articles (in English) on the South American  origins:  http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/1/72/htm  and  http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048438 .  Our article definitely should incorporate some of these data. Kdammers (talk) 10:13, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

The etymology of Chocolate is one of the worlds most controversial etymologies - several papers have been written and published by experts about it. The view that it should have come into Nahuatl from Pipil is not one of the most commonly defended hypotheses. Currently most experts seem to agree that Nahuatl chocolatl comes from the word chicolatl which is constructed from chihcol and atl. The relevant publications are:

Dakin, K., & Wichmann, S. (2000). Cacao and chocolate. Ancient Mesoamerica, 11(01), 55-75.
Kaufman, T., & Justeson, J. (2007). The history of the word for cacao in ancient Mesoamerica. Ancient Mesoamerica, 18(02), 193-237.
A chapter in a selfpublished thesis is not a reliable source for rewriting the etymology of this word on wikipedia. Sampecks suggestion is interesting but not shared by linguists, and she is herself an archeologist not a linguist.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 11:13, 13 August 2015 (UTC)


### Etymology of the word chocolate
It is widely agreed upon that the origin of the word 'chocolate' can be traced back to the nahuan languages. After reading an article in a journal published by the University of El Salvador, written by anthropologyst Dr. Kathryn Sampeck, I changed the article to reflect that the word came from the Nawat (Pipil) language of the family, and it was only in the late 16.th century that evidence shows this word to have been used in the Nahuatl of the Aztecs. Thus, the article concludes, the word originates from Nawat. This is not 'just' a thesis as claims from other uses reverting my changes state, it is an article in an university journal from a researcher in the field. It is as good as a secondary reference gets. While I do not know the rigor of the peer-review process of this particular journal, and think it might not be the most impactful, it is a respectable source nevertheless. Thus, I argue, changing the article to reflect the origin of the word is vaild.
I do not want to start reverting back and forth with User:Maunus, as I think it is counter-productive. Please let us discuss the issue here, I am open to changing my mind about this issue since I am by no expert in Meso-american history nor in Linguistics.

I had already started a discussion on this (new discussions generally go on the bottom). The main point is: the etymology is controversial and many experts have different views. Sampecks view has not gained any widespread acceptance (it may someday), and so should not be given undue prominence over the much more common view that it comes directly from Nahuatl either from the Nahuatl word xocolatl or chicolatl.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 11:42, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
I am sorry for not taking guidelines of the discussion, I thought it should go on top, but I apparently misread it. First of all, it is not a selfpublished thesis by Sampeck we are talking about, it is a publication by the University of El Salvador. You might dispute the relevance of the small journal, which probably has a very sub-optimal review process, but if so, please address it properly. I read the two articles you cite, and it seems to be quite the issue the etymology of the word. Neither of them, however, discards the argument. And certainly none of them argues in favor of Classical Nahuatl. Dakin and Wichmann argue it might be an eastern Nahuatl, which is an ancestor of the Pipil language from which the word originates. Kaufman and Justeson critizise the arguments in favor of an eastern-nauhuatl etymology for cacao, and only briefly discuss chocolate and the origin. They actually also show the archeological/anthropological argument which Sampeck also makes, but think another conclusion might be more likely, without specific arguments (p.217-218). In view of the arguments, while I do understand your skepticism for changing it to Nawat, leaving Classical Nahuatl there would be even more inaccurate. I suggest a more conservative approach, something like: 'The word "chocolate" has its origins in the Nahuan languages, chocolātl or chicolātl, and entered the English language from Spanish.', or a more eloquent variant that could be suggested Goens (talk) 14:48, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
I think Sampeck is fine as a source for her own proposal, I was thinking of the other source you added which seems to be a chapter of someone elses unpublished thesis. But yes, it is not possible to say anything definite except that it entered English from Spanish which got it from a Nahuatl word of uncertain etymology. Eastern Nahuatl is not the same as Nawat, and both Dakin and Wichmann and Kaufman and Justeson would probably agree that it entered Spanish through colonial Nahuatl and not through Pipil. So I think saying simply Nahuatl is much more accurate than simply adopting Sampeck's proposal (which is unlikely on linguistic grounds since Nahua ch- almost always comes from pre-proto-Nahuan *tsi, making a development tsikolat>chikolatl>chokolat>chukulut more linguistically plausible in my opinion). So yes, we need a cautious wording and we need to include all the hypotheses of the etymology.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 18:54, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Whence the claim that it was mixed with wine in early days?  What sort of wine do you think the Aztecs had?  Yes, they had alcohol, but wine??
Why is there a mention of chocolate being in South America?  What source is there for that?
Both are probably erroneous. 64.53.191.77 (talk) 20:46, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

In the "Modern Usage" section, three of the citations were labeled "citation needed," "unreliable source," and "dubious-discuss." There have been other users in the Talk Page that have also touched upon this, regarding other information or citations that were invalid in the article. The first two sections seem to be fine, but the majority of the information in the last section seems to be unreliable, and almost out of place. – – – – — Preceding unsigned comment added by Enararoy (talk • contribs) 03:46, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Tarascans valued chocolate, yet our article only talks about the Aztecs. Kdammers (talk) 03:43, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Not adding much that could not be included here, it provides largely an unnecessary elaboration of material included in History of chocolate. Example provided below. No history provided after the 18th century, and poor use of inline sources. The article is a translation from the Spanish article, and it is not clear why a history in Spain is significantly more important than France, England or Italy.
Elaboration example:
History of chocolate: "On the fourth voyage of Columbus, on August 15, 1502, the expedition came upon a Mayan trading canoe near an island in the Gulf of Honduras. A member of the Columbus expedition, while documenting the items on the canoe, noted the apparent value of cocoa beans based on the canoe crew's reaction when beans were dropped. However, they did not know what they were, nor that they could be used to make a drink."
History of chocolate in Spain: "The navigator Christopher Columbus, with the economic backing of the Catholic Monarchs, first reached the shores of the New World on 12 October 1492, initially believing that he had reached India. This voyage was carried out to expand markets by establishing new trade routes and therefore rival the Portuguese Empire, which was already well established in Asia. Following the success of that first voyage to the New World, others were organised with the intention of exploring and creating new trade routes. On his fourth voyage, Columbus, in 1502, met an unexpected storm and was forced to temporarily land on 15 August on the Bay Islands. In their first explorations of the area, Columbus' group came upon a boat of Mayan origin travelling from the Yucatán Peninsula. The Spaniards were surprised by the large size of the vessel. Columbus detained the vessel and examined the cargo, which contained cocoa beans that he called almonds in his diary. However, he did not attach importance to these, and after this original inspection he let the boat proceed with its cargo."
Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 23:51, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

From this example I don't see how the information in History of chocolate in Spain is meaningfully different from this article, it just provides (too much) context for the events. There is a lot that has very little to do with chocolate at all. The article in Spanish is much more focused, ironically, in the parts that weren't translated to English past the 19th century. I'd support a merge but don't know how useful it would be to this article to do so. Reconrabbit 20:29, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
I thought there would be more information worth bringing across, but reading through it again, there really isn't. I will just create a redirect. Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 03:47, 7 September 2024 (UTC)