National Cocoa Day

What the day is

National Cocoa Day is observed on December 13. Cocoa and hot chocolate are not quite the same drink, and the difference between them explains most of the history.

Origin and background

The drink began in Mesoamerica, where cacao was prepared cold, bitter and unsweetened, flavored with chili and other spices, and poured repeatedly between vessels from a height to raise a foam. The foam was the point. The drink carried ritual and economic weight, and cacao beans served as currency.

It reached Europe in the sixteenth century, where sugar was added and it became a wealthy person's drink, thick and rich because whole ground cacao is roughly half fat.

The decisive change came in 1828, when the Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten patented a press that squeezed most of the cocoa butter out of the ground beans, leaving a dry cake that could be powdered. He also treated it with alkali to darken the color and soften the harshness, a process still called Dutching. That one invention made cocoa cheap, mixable with water and widely drinkable, while the cocoa butter left over made solid eating chocolate possible. Almost everything the modern chocolate industry does descends from it.

The stimulant in cocoa is mostly theobromine rather than caffeine, which acts more gently and lasts longer. Dogs metabolize it far more slowly than people do, which is exactly why chocolate is dangerous to them.

On health claims, one irony is worth knowing. The flavanols behind cocoa's modest cardiovascular research results are substantially destroyed by the alkali processing that makes cocoa smooth and dark. The better-tasting powder generally holds less of what those studies were measuring.

How to take part

• Heat the milk gently rather than boiling it, which scorches and flattens the flavor.
• Add a pinch of salt. It does more for cocoa than additional sugar does.
• Taste natural non-alkalized cocoa alongside Dutched and notice how different they are.
• Make a real drinking chocolate from melted chocolate at least once. It is another drink entirely.
• Keep all of it well away from the dog.