“An army marches on its stomach,” Napoleon supposedly maintained, alluding to the critical importance of supplying food to soldiers. At the time the main military fare was salted meat and dry bread that may have satisfied soldiers’ hunger but officers, Napoleon thought, had to have better sustenance because they had to use their brain to make decisions. They needed a food that would provide good nourishment and would not spoil on long marches. Chocolate filled the bill!
Don’t think Lindt or Godiva bar, or even Hershey’s. The officers’ rations were nothing like our modern chocolate. More like the paste the Aztecs first produced in the 13th century by roasting cocoa beans and pounding them into a thick slurry that they frothed with water and chili to make a cold ceremonial beverage called “chocolatl” meaning “bitter water.” The Spanish “conquistadores” apparently found the beverage interesting enough to bring cocoa beans back to the Old World, but European palates did not take to the bitter drink until sugar was added. An obvious extension was to blend the paste with sugar to make a hard brick that could be carried around.
When a little stimulation was needed, shavings would be added to water to produce an instant energizing beverage. It was such bricks that were issued to Napoleon’s officers and did indeed serve as a source of energy. Cocoa beans contain the stimulants caffeine and theobromine and also are a good source of calories thanks to the cocoa butter they contain. Indeed, at the time cocoa concoctions were sold by apothecaries as “restoratives” and were even prescribed for fatigue, tuberculosis, melancholy, digestive problems and low libido.
Chocolate played a much bigger role in the Second World War. By this time the crude cocoa bean paste had been transformed into the enticing delicacy we know as chocolate. In the early 19th century, Dutch chemist Johannes van Houten invented the cocoa press that squeezed the fatty cocoa butter out of the roasted cacao beans, leaving behind “cocoa solids.” These were later found to be composed of insoluble fiber, proteins, caffeine, theobromine and chemicals in the polyphenol family that would later be the subject of much research due to their purported antioxidant properties.
Van Houten’s press was a key towards making edible chocolate. The cocoa solids left behind once the cocoa butter was removed could be pulverized into a powder that could easily be mixed with water. But van Houten made a further breakthrough, his “Dutching” process combined cocoa powder with potassium carbonate that then made for a less bitter beverage. Joseph Fry took the next critical step in 1847 by mixing cocoa powder with cocoa butter and sugar to formulate a mix that could be melted and molded. The chocolate bar was born! A portable luxury!
Swiss entrepreneur Daniel Peter would go on to add milk powder to Fry’s chocolate to produce the first milk chocolate. In 1879, Rodolphe Lindt, another Swiss chocolate maker, invented the conching machine that stirred the chocolate mix before it was poured into moulds until all the grittiness of the cocoa powder disappeared. This made for extremely smooth chocolate. Milton Hershey then revolutionized the chocolate industry by perfecting and producing affordable chocolate, transforming the chocolate bar from a luxury item to a popular staple. To produce the volume of chocolate needed, he built a factory in Pennsylvania and founded a town around it for the workers somewhat haughtily named “Hershey.” In 1905, his factory began to churn out “Hersey bars” that two years later would be joined by the famous Hershey kisses, all hand wrapped at the time.
In 1937, with war on the horizon, the Hershey company was contracted by U.S. army suppliers to produce a chocolate bar that could serve as an emergency source of nutrition for soldiers, particularly in tropical climates. They wanted a bar that would supply about 600 calories, weigh 4 ounces and resist melting. There was one other requirement. Lack of good taste! The army wanted soldiers to resort to eating it in an emergency, not as a candy bar.
Hershey chemists rose to the challenge and came up with the D-ration (D for Defense) made of cocoa powder, cocoa butter, sugar, skim milk powder, vanilla flavouring, thiamine and oat flour. The cocoa butter is the problem when it comes to melting because it has a melting point just around body temperature. Not great for carrying around in the pocket! So, the bar was made with less cocoa butter than usual, but the key to preventing melting was the oat flour that absorbs any cocoa butter as soon as it melts and prevents it from liquifying. When American soldiers were shipped off to Europe to join the war, D-rations went with them. As the army had requested, these were not a gustatory delight. “It was as if a boiled potato had been mixed with chocolate” one soldier famously quipped.
In 1943, the army gave in to the soldiers’ palates and commissioned a tastier bar to be made. Soon the “Tropical Bar” was introduced with less out flour and more cocoa butter. This met with somewhat more success, but what the soldiers really liked were the candy-coated chocolates that had been developed by the Mars and Murrie Company. They melted in the mouth and not in the hand! Or pocket. The M&Ms were so popular that the company was unable to produce enough chocolate to meet the demand and ended up partnering with Hershey’s to provide the chocolate while it produced the candy coating. Neither the D-ration nor the Tropical Bar met with any commercial success after the war, but the public did fall in love with the M&M’s that helped defeat Hitler.
Today, with demand for chocolate increasing, especially in warmer climates, manufacturers have dug into their chemical toolbox to develop chocolates that are heat-stable without sacrificing taste. Much of the chemistry is proprietary, but it involves substituting some higher-melting vegetable fats for cocoa butter, adding microcrystalline cellulose to slow the flow of fat, using emulsifiers such as polyglycerol polyricinoleate to prevent moisture and fat from separating, and incorporating food gums like guar gum or carrageenan to form a gel network that keeps cocoa particles and fat in suspension. While the heat-stable chocolates produced today are far better than the D-rations and Tropical Bars of yesteryear, they will not match the taste and texture of a Lindt, Godiva or even a Hershey’s bar, to say nothing of the outrageously expensive Scharffen Berger bar that has been judged by experts to be the best.
Napoleon’s idea of using chocolate as a military ration did not meet with great success, but he had more luck with his backing of the “Appert process.” In 1795, the French government had offered a 12,000-franc prize for a method to preserve food, a challenge that was met by Nicholas Appert with his invention of a method to cook food in sealed bottles, a prelude to the canning process. Napoleon’s army marched without worries of spoiled food in the stomach.
