Hot chocolate belongs to the coldest stretch of the year, and National Hot Chocolate Day is the excuse to make a proper one. Warm the milk, stir it slowly, and drink it in the warmest chair in the house.
One holiday registry's archived January 31 pages do not carry National Hot Chocolate Day in 2013, 2014 or 2015 and do carry it in 2016, which dates the listing rather than the day. No founder or establishing record has been located: searches of the Federal Register and of HathiTrust's full-text index return nothing under the name.
The chocolate bar is a leftover from a cup. Cornell University Library's exhibition on chocolate dates the modern industry to an 1828 press whose product was an easily prepared powdered hot chocolate, and the cocoa butter that press took out is what makes a bar supple enough to mould. National Hot Chocolate Day belongs to the thing that came first.
For most of its history chocolate was something you drank, and for a long stretch of that history it was not a drink anyone would recognise today. Even the pots it was served in are the wrong shape for the cup people picture.
What belongs in the cup turns out to be a legal question as much as a domestic one. Three jurisdictions have written answers into law, and each of them drew the line somewhere different.
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National Hot Chocolate Day ran on January 31. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
Puerto Escondido, in what is now Honduras, has produced the residue of a cacao beverage inside a spouted bottle from the Ocotillo phase. Radiocarbon dates from the layers beneath it put the bottle after 1150 B.C.
It was probably not chocolate. The team that analysed the residues argued for something else: a drink likely made by fermenting the sweet fruit pulp around the seeds rather than the seeds themselves. The bottle agrees with them, because that shape is adapted for pouring liquids and is no use for raising a froth.
Frothing became a standard step in the Mesoamerican preparation. When a spouted bottle with a flaring neck turns up in the Middle Formative, the same researchers read the new shape as a possible sign that somebody had begun whipping air into the cup.
Cornell University Library's chocolate exhibition records that Spaniards introduced the drinking of chocolate to Europe, where, in the medical system of the time, those who could afford it used chocolate as a tonic and remedy. Comfort came later than the prescription did.
Cornell's exhibition puts untreated cocoa mass, the paste left after grinding the beans, at about 53 percent cocoa butter. In 1828 Van Houten patented his method for taking most of that out, a hydraulic press that brought the figure down to about 27 percent. What was left was a cake dry enough to be milled into the powder now sold as cocoa.
The American version arrived out of a warehouse. Charles Sanna's family firm, Sanna Dairy Engineers, had been supplying American troops with packets of powdered creamer during the Korean War, and overproduced to be sure of meeting its contract.
Sanna worked the surplus into a cocoa mix at his own stove in Menomonie, Wisconsin, using powdered creamer, cocoa, sugar, vanilla and hot water. His brother called it Brown Swiss. Renamed and relaunched in 1961, Smithsonian Magazine reports, it became the first instant cocoa that could be made with hot water instead of milk.
The observance is the one part of this story with no record behind it. What it carries instead is the oldest thing in the cupboard.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
A trace of theobromine is the whole proof.
Theobromine is a chemical component limited in Central America to Theobroma species, so its residue inside a potsherd identifies cacao with no written record required. It is how a spouted bottle in Honduras was recognised as a cacao vessel at all.
Cacao starch grains, absorbed theobromine residues and ancient DNA at the Santa Ana-La Florida site in southeast Ecuador date from approximately 5,300 years ago. That finding puts the oldest known centre of cacao domestication in the upper Amazon rather than in Mesoamerica.
Charles Sanna's mix is credited with launching America's instant hot chocolate industry. It worked with hot water rather than milk, which is why a cup of it asks for nothing but a kettle.
GOOD TO KNOW
The Princeton Vase, a Late Classic drinking cup dated 670 to 750 in the Princeton University Art Museum, shows a woman pouring a stream of liquid chocolate from one vessel into another. The museum notes that chocolate was frothed for drinking in a vessel like this one, as specified by one of the hieroglyphic texts on the vase itself.
Gas chromatography on four Chotepe-phase samples from Puerto Escondido turned up no beeswax marker compounds for honey and no capsaicin for chile, two of the additives later chocolate drinks carried. Their absence is part of why the early drink is read as a pulp beverage rather than a seed one.
Cocoa powder does not readily mix with liquid, so Van Houten treated it with alkaline salts to improve it. The treatment came to be known as Dutching.
Charles Sanna's brother named the powdered cocoa Brown Swiss, after a breed of dairy cow. The milk in the product actually came from Holsteins, which give milk with less butterfat.
Brown Swiss sold largely to airlines and restaurants, and then it stopped. They quit buying the cocoa packets after noticing that customers were swiping them.
GOOD TO KNOW
Federal law grades the powder by how much fat was pressed out of it: breakfast cocoa at not less than 22 percent cacao fat, cocoa between 10 and 22 percent, lowfat cocoa under 10 percent. Part 163 sets fifteen standardized cacao products, and none of them describes a drink.
EU law reserves drinking chocolate for a mixture of cocoa powder and sugars containing not less than 25 percent cocoa powder, and chocolate a la taza for a chocolate made with flour or starch from wheat, rice or maize, capped at 8 percent. A family grade allows up to 18 percent, and the reserved names must be used in trade.
The Mexican standard NOM-186-SSA1/SCFI-2013 defines chocolate para mesa as a product made from cacao paste and unrefined sugar, and it requires that sugar to have a particle size greater than 70 microns. The grade is written around its grain.
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No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing found in the indexes checked, so January 31 is a normal working day.
COLOPHON
National Cocoa Day keeps December for the powder rather than the bar. Warm a mug of it slowly, or work a spoonful into a stew for the depth it brings to the pot.
Indulge in chocolatey goodness and celebrate National Chocolate Day with sweet treats, rich desserts, and delicious recipes!
Indulge your sweet tooth on National Chocolate Candy Day - satisfy your cravings with a variety of delicious chocolates and candies!
