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Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. Do you have someone in mind to be your Valentine? One of the most popular gifts to give on February 14th is chocolate. This delicious candy comes in so many forms, and it is a nice way to tell someone that you like them. Have you ever wondered where chocolate came from? The history of chocolate may surprise you.

There is actually no written history of chocolate production until 1492, when Christopher Columbus brought back many treasures from his voyages overseas. One of the things he brought to the King and Queen of Spain were cocoa beans, which today are the principal ingredient in chocolate. However, it wasn’t until the early 1500’s when Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez voyaged to Mexico, that chocolate became recognized as valuable.

He found that the Aztec Indians used cocoa beans in preparing a thick, cold, unsweetened royal drink called chocolatl. Cortez and his men didn’t like the bitterness of the drink and thought that adding cane sugar and warming it would help. He was right, and the warm sweet drink made from cocoa beans became a delicacy among Spanish royalty. Spain kept their discovery of this chocolate drink a secret from the rest of Europe for almost 100 years.

By the mid 1600’s the chocolate drink spread quickly through France and England. In England, chocolate houses were becoming as popular as coffee houses. In 1765, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the New World’s first chocolate factory opened. By 1847, a Dutch chemist invented a cocoa press, which allowed chocolate producers to make hard candy. Up until this time, chocolate was only enjoyed in a liquid form! And in 1876, Daniel Peter, a Swiss candy maker devised a way of adding milk to chocolate, creating the milk chocolate that we know and love today.

Can you believe it has only been 154 years since chocolate candy has been around? And now it is so popular that you can buy it in almost any store that sells food. So when you think about what to get your Valentine this year, think about giving them some chocolate. And while you nibble on its sweetness, you can think about how precious it has been to people for hundreds of years!