The first record of chocolate was more then fifteen hundred years ago. The Aztecs got the cocoa from the Mayans and on pieces of Mayan pottery that has been found, there are images of the cocoa pods because they believed that the cacao symbolised life and fertility. The records of the European conquistadors tell us that the Aztecs used to make a spicy, bitter drink from the fruit of the Cacao tree. The toasted, ground beans were mixed with boiling hot water to create the beverage, they gave it the name Xocoatl. One of the Spanish explorers although we do not know who it was, brought the cacao back to Spain and there in the 1500s they began to add flavourings such as vanilla, cinnamon and cane sugar to sweeten the chocolate. But the popularity of chocolate greatly increased in 1569 when Pope Pius V decided that drinking chocolate did not count as breaking the fast.
By the 1600s chocolate houses had been set up all over Europe and they became a place for the higher, richer classes to get together and socialise. Chocolate was not extremely common at the time and so it was very expensive which separated the rich from the poor.
By 1704 a tax had been imposed on chocolate in Germany, everyone had to pay two 'thallers' for a permit to wear chocolate. Chocolate reaches America in 1755. Solid chocolate was developed in 1830 by J.S. Fry and Sons, who were British chocolatiers. Just before the production of solid chocolate the cocoa press was invented in 1828 which made the chocolate taste better and decreased the price.
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