Just as with coffee and tea, chocolate was initially boiled up for drinking. Like coffee and tea, chocolate was sweetened and flavored, and eventually used for baking. Chocolate differs from coffee and tea, though, in containing more than 50% fat. This meant that it was possible to develop chocolate that could be eaten rather than drunk. It wasn't easy. Getting from cacao pods to the Sweetique Egg took centuries of technological innovation.
Chocolate was brought to Europe from the Americas in the 1500s, and by the 1700s it was a popular beverage all over Europe.
Dutch chemist Casparus van Houten developed a cocoa press in 1828 that could remove the cocoa butter and leave cocoa powder. His son Coenraad Van Houten developed the first approximation of eating chocolate over the next two decades, but Englishman Joseph Fry is generally credited with creating the first actual chocolate bar in 1847. Fry melted cocoa butter, combined it with cocoa powder, and molded a candy bar. In 1875, Daniel Peter and Henri Nestle added powdered milk to chocolate to create milk chocolate, and it was in 1879 that Rodolphe Lindt developed the conching process that led to chocolate that melts on the tongue.
Eating chocolate overtook drinking chocolate in popularity in the twentieth century, and now Americans eat ten to twelve pounds of chocolate a year -- though we still can't compare with Europeans. The British, according to the most recent figures, eat 35 pounds of chocolate per capita each year. They were the first to have eating chocolate available, after all, and we simply haven't caught up with them yet.
