(When is) World Chocolate Day

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We’re putting up this week’s blog post a little earlier than normal this week. Hopefully you are reading it on Friday so we can celebrate WORLD CHOCOLATE DAY, which has been set as the 7th July.

Normally, we’re all up for any chance to celebrate craft chocolate. Hence this blog post to celebrate (and also investigate) World Chocolate Day.

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Without wishing to sound like a bit of a curmudgeon and spoilsport, but in keeping with the questioning approach that underpins my usual blogs; World Chocolate Day is a bit odd.

It was set up in 2009 (so happy 14th birthday to World Chocolate Day!). We’re not clear who came up with this day, even that amazing compendium, the National Day Calendar, hasn’t managed to come up with a ‘patron saint’ or founder for World Chocolate Day. But they, and many other online articles, including Wired Magazine back in 2010, suggest that World Chocolate Day is celebrated on July 7 “…because chocolate was first brought to Europe in 1550”.

Celebrate World Chocolate Day’s 14th birthday with a 14% discount on the bars and box below!
Use code: WORLDCHOCOLATEDAY14

Hmm… The first record we have for any European ‘discovering’ chocolate is on Columbus’ fourth voyage when his son noted how some Mayan tribesmen dropped what he thought were almonds and ran after them with great alacrity, leading him to assume that these “almonds” were a currency. And strictly speaking, cocoa beans were a currency in Mayan and Aztec civilizations; and they continued to be used as a currency in some parts of Latin America up to the mid-1850s. But Columbus and his son missed that cocoa was far, far more than a mere currency in Latin American culture and cuisine.

Hernan Cortes, in his conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1519-23, was far more aware and impressed with cocoa’s importance, power, and potency. His chroniclers noted that the Aztec army “could march for a day” on a single cup of chocolate. And they also noted a series of gruesome sacrifices to their gods involving knives dipped in chocolate being used to cut the hearts out of captured warriors and torment children (check my earlier blog post for grizzly detail). And of course, most notoriously, the chronicles also note how Emperor Montezuma would consume the “froth from fifty golden cups of chocolate before retiring to his wives”, leaving the cocoa to his court and continuing to party away.

The first date we have for chocolate being consumed in Europe is 1544 when the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas brought a delegation of Kekchi (or Q’eqchi) Mayan leaders to the court of the future Philip II of Spain, who gave the future monarch a series of gifts including 2000 quetzal feathers, chillies, sarsaparilla, and both cocoa beans and chocolate for drinking. Whilst Philip really liked the feathers and chillies, his reaction to the chocolate is not recorded; which may well mean that he wasn’t that impressed.

Over the next forty years, the habit of drinking chocolate grew in Europe, pushed in particular by the clergy as a drink suitable for fasting (i.e. abstaining from any animal product). And by 1585 the first official shipment of cocoa beans reached Seville from Veracruz (various records also exist of earlier shipments over the prior decade, but these were more ‘ad hoc’).

But none of these key dates; 1502, 1519, 1544 or 1585; explain what is supposed to have happened on July 7th 1550. If any budding chocolate historians can shed light on what happened, please do let us know!

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While you ponder all this, please do try some bars made by the descendants of the Q’echi from Lachua, Guatemala:

And also, please belatedly join us in celebrating the 4th of July with a box of American craft chocolate bars that we’ve tried to make truly “international” to celebrate “World Chocolate Day” with bars from Askinosie, Taza, French Broad, Fruition, and Lumineux; crafting beans from the Philippines, Madagascar, Haiti, Ghana, and Indonesia:

And just to show we aren’t curmudgeons, please use the coupon code WORLDCHOCOLATEDAY14 to celebrate World Chocolate Day’s 14th birthday, and take 14% off any Q’Echi/Lachua bar and 14% off our 4th of July box.

Keep savouring!

Spencer

p.s. If you’re a subscriber to our monthly craft chocolate boxes, check your inbox for an exclusive invite to a subscriber-only event!