![]() In addition to laboratory analysis, the survey offers a glimpse of the consumer chocolate experience in the 1890s, detailing the names of these products, how they were packaged, and their retail prices. An increasing number of imports had been entering the market since 1850, among them: from Britain, Epps, Fry, and Rowntree Germany’s Stollwerck Dutch firms Van Houten, Blooker, and Bensdorp Menier, the most popular French brand. Roughly half of the dozen or so domestic brands included in the investigation, purchased from the shelves of grocers and druggists, were manufactured in New York City: Maillard, Huyler’s, Rockwood, Hawley & Hoops, and Runkel were the most prominent, alongside Whitman and Wilbur from Philadelphia, and, of course, Baker in Boston. Created were mechanisms to enforce greater transparency and standards of identity to establish a baseline of wholesomeness and quality not just in chocolate, of course, but for all processed food products.Ī year before Milton Snavely Hershey began plotting his own chocolate business and seven years before launching what would become his iconic bar, New York’s makers dominated the market in 1892. ![]() Wiley’s efforts, begun in the 1880s, would ultimately lead to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. ![]() While today we enjoy manufactured food products like chocolate with a degree of confidence and trust in its listed ingredients, in the 19th century chocolate may have contained starches, colorants, and inedible fillers from cocoa shell to brick dust. The Popular Confectioner, Death, Manufacturing Bonbons and Candies for the Holidays, Harper's Weekly, Dec 1858 (Collection of the Author) Spearheaded by USDA chemist Harvey Wiley, the work was in response to decades of alleged malpractice in a virtually unregulated food system – from meat and dairy to highly processed products like chocolate and cocoa. The full title of Bulletin 13 was Food and Food Adulterants. The reports were compiled by the chemistry division within the United States Department of Agriculture, established thirty years prior by Abraham Lincoln. Under the subtitle, Coffee, Tea, and Cocoa Preparations, this study of chocolate and cocoa was the seventh part of a broader investigation colloquially referred to as Bulletin 13. Part market study, and part scientific treatise on the composition and manufacturing of these chocolate products, the publication was born out of emerging ideas about consumer protection amid the growing industrialization of food production. This post was contributed by Michael Laiskonis, Pastry Chef, Consultant, Educator The Chocolate Lab at the Institute of Culinary Education NYC, James Beard Foundation ‘Outstanding Pastry Chef’ 2007, IACP ‘Culinary Professional of the Year’ 2014.įrom a survey of chocolate products available to consumers in an 1892 publication that “represented very nearly all the brands obtainable at the time,” one gets a clear snapshot of the chocolate industry at a time when, “the variety of preparations offered to American consumers is certainly very great.” By the 1890s the world was in the throes of what some have called the first great chocolate “boom.” We might look back at this moment in time as a weigh station of sorts, an assessment of how chocolate evolved from the previous century, and how those trend lines would develop into what we think of as “industrial” chocolate in the 20th century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |