Each year on January 31, National Hot Chocolate Day warms up people across the country by celebrating the timeless cold-weather beverage.
Hot chocolate is a warm beverage made with ground chocolate, heated milk or water, and sugar. In America, we often use the terms hot chocolate and hot cocoa interchangeably. However, the two beverages are different.
- We make hot cocoa with cocoa powder, heated milk or water, and sugar. We’re able to do this thanks to a process developed by father and son chemists.
- Hot chocolate has also been around longer than hot cocoa. In the early 1800s, Casparus van Houten Sr. developed a process to separate the cocoa solids from the butter. His son, Coenraad Johannes made those fats more soluble in water. Together their processes made cocoa powder possible.
- 2000 years ago, the Mayans likely created the first chocolate beverage. A cocoa beverage was also an essential part of Aztec culture by 1400 AD. Europe popularized the drink after it was introduced from Mexico to the New World.
- There are health benefits to drinking hot chocolate. Cocoa contains significant amounts of antioxidants that may help prevent cancer. It has also been shown that cocoa beans help with digestion. The flavonoids that are found in cocoa also have a positive effect on arterial health.
- What’s the difference between Hot Chocolate and Hot Cocoa? Hot Chocolate uses milk or milk chocolate while Hot Cocoa uses only powdered cocoa
- The first hot chocolate was Mayan, and it was served with chili peppers!
- In Spain, hot chocolate with churros is considered a working man’s breakfast.
- Chocolate is the 3rd most traded commodity in the world. 1st is oil, 2nd is coffee.
- From the 16th to 19th centuries, hot chocolate was valued as a medicine as well as a drink. The explorer Francisco Hernández wrote that chocolate beverages helped treat fever and liver disease.
- In 1657, chocolate was very expensive and sold in establishments that are similar to modern coffee shops known as the Chocolate House.
- North Americans were introduced to the drinking version of chocolate in the 17th century by the Dutch. These first time colonists began selling hot chocolate around 1755.
- Another explorer, Santiago de Valverde Turices, believed that large amounts of hot chocolate were helpful in treating chest ailments, but in smaller amounts could help stomach disorders.
- A study conducted by Cornell University has shown that hot chocolate contains more antioxidants than wine and tea, therefore reducing the risk of heart disease.
- Visitors to Monticello can sample a hot chocolate made the way Thomas Jefferson preferred it. Using stone roasted cacao, sugar, and spices.
- A cocoa drink was an essential part of Aztec culture by 1400 AD, by which they referred to as xocōlātl. The Aztecs believed that cacao seeds were the gift of Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom, and the seeds once had so much value that they were used as a form of currency.
- European hot chocolate first came to the US as early as the 1600s by the Dutch, but the first time colonists began selling hot chocolate was around 1755.
- During World War I, volunteers from the YMCA set up recovery stations near the battlefields to assist and comfort fatigued troops; warm cups of hot chocolate were staples at these stations.
- Americans fighting in World War II were also treated to the hot drink when cocoa was added to some of the military’s field rations in 1944.
- The hot chocolate effect, also known as the allassonic effect, is a phenomenon of wave mechanics first documented in 1982 by Frank Crawford, where the pitch heard from tapping a cup of hot liquid rises after the addition of a soluble powder.
- British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men subsisted off hot cocoa and stew during their yearlong trek to the South Pole. The expedition made it to the pole in January 1912, only to find that a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had gotten there a month prior. Tragically, Scott’s team ran out of provisions on the return journey and perished, while Amundsen, who had packed five times as much cocoa, returned a hero. Decades later,
- in 1989, the six members of a sled-dog expedition across Antarctica consumed nearly 2100 packets of Swiss Miss hot cocoa.
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