From an entire tray of hand dipped chocolates, my two favorites are the chocolate dipped caramels and the chocolate dipped turtles. I concede that turtles are made up of caramel and pecans – (I admit pecans are nuts.)

Why? Like any of our favorites, it’s the flavor & texture combination.

At the risk of offending our chocolate purists, who pride themselves in claiming the rich romantic Mesoamerican heritage of chocolate’s ancestry; caramel has an uncertain and questionable ancient past. Though caramel and caramel candies have been with us for centuries, their exact origins are a bit murky. We may question their family tree.

All my extensive research leads me a thousand years back to the Arabs. When I think about the Arabs, I don’t ponder the peace accords or middle east conflicts or even caramel. My mind reflects back to Ahab the Arab. Ahab however has nothing to do with caramel, so I’ll let you figure it out. Except maybe all the caramel historians got it wrong and they thought they were researching camels not caramels. But that’s your issue.*

Some say the Arabs first discovered caramel around 1000 A.D. Again, I don’t know who “some” really is, or is that are? But suffice to say, what we believe is there is evidence that around 1,000 A.D. the Arabs were crystallizing sugar to make what translators think the Arabs called a “kurat al milh” or “sweet ball of salt” or  “ball of sweet.” These first caramels aren’t like the caramel we enjoy today. That ball of sweet was a hard candy – rock hard – solid hard. That was due to the combination of sugar and water they were boiling over kettles.

Some say one form of this crystallized sugar and water mixture was used mainly in the beauty industry for waxing and sugaring—something I know nothing about. It was only later that the ‘ball of sweet’ became a confection.

Eventually, those tired of chipping their teeth, learned they could toss some milk and a little fat into the kettle and the results were a creamy texture with some stretchy consistency – basically more like our modern-day caramel.

Theory holds that somewhere in the mid 1600’s fat and milk became the more common tools to give caramel its chewiness.

Theory aside, we know that when milk solids and fats are heated with sugar and allowed to caramelize, we get some version of our current types of caramel. Note that we use the verb version (caramelize) of our noun (caramel) here. The Arabs probably didn’t know how to use verbs as nouns and so historians couldn’t accurately record the history of caramel and that’s why caramel’s origins are murky.

But in modern implementation of verbs and nouns, caramel remains a favorite treat because the nouns include sugar, milk, corn syrup and fat (butter). The verbs are ‘to heat’ and ‘to stir.’ Throw in an adverb; ’constantly’ and you have chocolate’s BFF.

Any wonder caramel has been so popular and remains a favorite sweet treat? It’s all about simple ingredients combined in just the right way. The results are delicious.

Jumping forward a few hundred years, caramel’s popularity increased greatly when Milton S. Hershey began his first successful candy business in 1886 called the Lancaster Caramel Company. Because you’re smart and you read what I said first, you quickly thought of the second candy company. But let’s stick with the first company Lancaster Caramel Company, which after it was established, was shipping caramel candies across the United States and to Europe.

Hershey’s introduction of caramel candies grew on a grand scale. Since then, caramel candy has taken on many forms and textures, such as sauces, creams, hard and soft candies, and glazes for foods such as popcorn.

Let’s get a little more granular. (Purposely a pun)

We’ve covered the fact that caramel is a combination of a few simple ingredients—sugar, water, fat, and milk. Now when combined in different orders, they will yield very different forms of caramel.

For instance, the traditional “dry method” of caramel making starts with boiling just your sugar, (yes, just melting the sugar dry) and adding the other three ingredients after. The other alternative “wet method” boils sugar and water together as one, and then adds the fat and milk later—this is what most caramel manufacturers do.

Depending on the method that you choose, your caramel will look and taste quite different—the dry method leads to a thicker, darker caramel that is used in hard candy, while the wet method results in the good stuff used for hand dipped chocolates.

Oh, and by the way, during the Lancaster Caramel Co.’s final years, Hershey shifted his focus toward chocolate and created the Hershey’s Chocolate Company as a subsidiary of Lancaster. Then in 1900, Hershey sold off the entire caramel business to The American Caramel Company for a sly $1 million thinking that it was just a fad and chocolate had more long-term potential. What’s he thinking now?

*

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Back sometime in the early 1960’s, which is after the Spanish conquered the new world and took the cacao bean back to Europe and ruined it by adding sugar and figuring out how to mold into bars to addict innocent children and lonely women; my mother learned how to turn her kitchen into a devilish addiction factory.

It was Myrtle Rappeley!* She is to blame. Just as the Spanish introduced xocolati to the unsuspecting royal courts in Europe, Myrtle introduced my mother and her best friend Mona Brown to the art of hand dipping chocolates. If I remember the details correctly as they played out some 60 years ago, (I don’t dare ask my siblings if this story is true because those older than me have lost their minds and those younger were too young to pay attention.) our local church congregation was participating in the building of a new chapel and everyone was expected to contribute a certain amount of money to the construction. The group of Relief Society women, as they are called, were asked to generate a portion of the assessment. As my mother was one of the leaders of this local group of women. It was suggested they make homemade hand-dipped chocolates and sell them to fund their portion of the new building’s construction.

When Myrtle suggested they make hand-dipped chocolates my mother responded saying, “I don’t know how to make hand-dipped chocolates.” Myrtle quickly said, “you will.” How prophetic she was.

The chocolates were not only wildly popular but the fund raising effort was wildly successful. The tradition of hand dipping chocolates began.

My mother’s sisters, all magicians in their own kitchens, went all-in as well. This art of hand dipping chocolates spread quickly through my mother’s family. To this day, the tradition lives on.

This past Christmas season, fourth and fifth generation grandchildren participated in the process of making hand-dipped chocolates, including my sons and daughter. I’m not talking about just the eating part of the process, my young grandchildren, nieces and grand nieces are quite proficient at hand dipping.  And of course we’ve all mastered the eating process as well.

Thank you Mom.

*Quote from Myrtle’s obituary – “She was especially famous for her hand-dipped chocolates, buttercream mints, and toffee.”

Obituary of Myrtle (Hess) Rappleye

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The study of the history of chocolate will bring a giant smile to the face of any serious connoisseur of this ancient currency. (Not to mention the smile when you stuff some into your mouth – liquid or solid.)

The word currency was not a mistake, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The smile comes when you see how archeologists, anthropologists, etymologists, and the other sundry ologists try to put a finger on the origin of the world’s favorite addiction—chocolate.

In the words of Inigo Montoya, “No, there is too much, let me sum up.”

To make it easy, I will use the term “cacao to refer to the plant or its beans before processing. “Chocolate” refers to anything made from the beans and “cocoa” will refer the chocolate in powdered form.

They say chocolate was invented by the folks in Mesoamerica. That’s somewhere between Texas and Chile. More accurately, there is clear evidence from the aforementioned smarty folks that chocolate was an important drink in Central and South America as early as 400 to 500 AD. Others say a millennia or two before that.

Lots of evidence shows the cacao had its beginning in Mesoamerica. The Aztecs, Mayan’s and even the Inca as far south as southern Ecuador, (and likely their predecessors) considered chocolate the drink of the Gods. Yet, there is evidence that the early residents as far north as Central Utah had chocolate nearly 1200 years ago. (That’s before the pioneers)

Some claim it was the Olmec in ancient Mexico and then later the Mayans who poured a mixture of roasted and ground cacao seeds, mixed with chiles, water and maize to make a frothy beverage called xocolati. My bet is that the natives offered the Spanish conquerors a nice hot chocolate that was fermented and the translators couldn’t spell worth a hoot so they wrote it xocolati.

None the less, when the conquistadors showed up, they realized gold wasn’t nearly as valuable to the natives as was cacao beans. Cacao beans were used as currency. One bean could buy you a tamale, and a hen turkey could be purchased for 100 beans.

One Spanish chronicler reported he witnessed that when loading a bundle of the cacao beans, some spilled and the indigenous peoples hurried to pick up each bean.

Well, the cacao bean made it back to Europe where of course the snoots there couldn’t deal with the bitterness so they added sugar and voila, an addiction was born.

Over the decades, production processes became more efficient and thus the cost declined and the rich and famous were no longer the only folk to afford the chocolate craze.

Cacao plantations spread as the English, Dutch and French colonized and planted. Chemists got involved and figured out how to remove some of the bitterness by introducing alkaline salts to chocolate, then they figured out how to remove much of the natural fat, which we know as cocoa butter which made chocolate cheaper to produce and more consistent in quality. The guy was probably Dutch so they call it Dutch Cocoa. That was when chocolate began really taking on a solid form when they figured out how to add the cocoa butter back in. It’s all really sciency and we’ll get into the details of it and why it matters in future articles.

Then in 1875 a guy by the name of Daniel Peter invented milk chocolate by mixing in powdered milk which was developed by a guy named Henri Nestle. A few years later Rodolphe Lindt invented a machine that further improved the process and the quality of the solid chocolate. Do you recognize a few names? Along came John Cadbury and William Hershey in the 1800’s and well, now most of us sensible folk are just willing to use our currency to acquire the brand and flavor we like best and where the Mayan’s and Aztecs, used chocolate for religious purposes, as aphrodisiacs, healing and status, we civilized folk use chocolate religiously to woo our women, seduce our men, heal broken hearts, calm harried nerves, sugar up our grandchildren and mostly feed our addiction.

And if you don’t believe me, wander through a few references you’ll find at www.handdippedchocolates.com.

word chokol meaning hot, and the Nahuatl atl meaning water.

References

1. Watson, Traci (22 January 2013). “Earliest Evidence of Chocolate in North America”. Science. Retrieved 3 March 2014.
2. Kerr, Justin (2007). “History of Chocolate”. Field Museum. Retrieved 2014-03-03.
3. Schnepel, Ellen (Fall 2002). “Chocolate: From Bean to Bar”. Gastronomica. 2 (4): 98–100. doi:10.1525/gfc.2002.2.4.98.
4. Bensen, Amanda (March 1, 2008). “A Brief History of Chocolate”. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 3 March 2014.
5. Terry G. Powis; W. Jeffrey Hurst; María del Carmen Rodríguez; Ponciano Ortíz C.; Michael Blake; David Cheetham; Michael D. Coe; John G. Hodgson (December 2007). “Oldest chocolate in the New World”. Antiquity. 81 (314). ISSN 0003-598X. Retrieved 2011-02-15.
6. “Sweet discovery: New UBC study pushes back the origins of chocolate”. UBC News. 29 October 2018.
7. “The use and domestication of Theobroma cacao during the mid-Holocene in the upper Amazon”. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 2 (12): 1879–1888. doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0697-x.
8. Thompson, J. Eric S. (1956). “Notes on the use of cacao in Middle America”. Middle American Archaeology. Cambridge Mass. 128: 95–116.
9. “Medicinal and Ritualistic Use for Chocolate in Mesoamerica – HeritageDaily – Heritage & Archaeology News”. www.heritagedaily.com. Retrieved 2018-05-07.
10. Magazine, Smithsonian; Fiegl, Amanda. “A Brief History of Chocolate”. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2022-12-01.
11. Spadaccini, Jim. “The Sweet Lure of Chocolate”. Exploratorium. Retrieved 2014-03-03.
12. Dillinger, Teresa L.; Barriga, Patricia; Escárcega, Sylvia; Jimenez, Martha; Lowe, Diana Salazar; Grivetti, Louis E. (2000-08-01). “Food of the Gods: Cure for Humanity? A Cultural History of the Medicinal and Ritual Use of Chocolate”. The Journal of Nutrition. 130 (8): 2057S–2072S. doi:10.1093/jn/130.8.2057S. ISSN 0022-3166.
13. TED-Ed (2017-03-16), The history of chocolate – Deanna Pucciarelli, archived from the original on 2021-12-19, retrieved 2018-05-07
14. Norton, Marcy (April 2004). “Conquests of Chocolate”. OAH Magazine of History. 18 (3): 16. doi:10.1093/maghis/18.3.14. JSTOR 25163677.
15. Magazine, Smithsonian; Fiegl, Amanda. “A Brief History of Chocolate”. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2022-12-01.
16. Kaufman, Terrence; Justeson, John (2007). “The history of the word for Cacao in ancient Mesoamerica”. Ancient Mesoamerica. 18 (2): 193–237. Retrieved 18 June 2021.
17. Klein, Christopher (February 14, 2014). “The Sweet History of Chocolate”. History. Retrieved 2014-03-03.
18. “Top 10 Cocoa Producing Countries”. WorldAtlas. Retrieved 2017-10-09.

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