Month: February 2008

A brief history of chocolate

Ancient, Medieval, Modern(ish)

Smithsonian Magazine has a great little article on the history of chocolate. I knew that it was primarily a drink for most of its history, but I didn’t realize it only was made a solid only after the Dutch process made a powder from chocolate liquor.

In 1828, a Dutch chemist found a way to make powdered chocolate by removing about half the natural fat (cacao butter) from chocolate liquor, pulverizing what remained and treating the mixture with alkaline salts to cut the bitter taste. His product became known as “Dutch cocoa,” and it soon led to the creation of solid chocolate.

The creation of the first modern chocolate bar is credited to Joseph Fry, who in 1847 discovered that he could make a moldable chocolate paste by adding melted cacao butter back into Dutch cocoa.

By 1868, a little company called Cadbury was marketing boxes of chocolate candies in England. Milk chocolate hit the market a few years later, pioneered by another name that may ring a bell – Nestle.

So it seems the cream egg is the least of Cadbury’s accomplishments.

John Cadbury, incidentally, was a Quaker of notable social consciousness who went into the chocolate/coffee/tea beverage business out of Temperance Society idealism.

The Cadbury’s site has an excellent history section itself, both of the company and of the bean.

Minoan Crete in New York City

Ancient, Museums

The Onassis Cultural Center will be hosting an exhibit of ancient Minoan artifacts starting March 13.

The exhibition brings to light aspects of Minoan daily life during the second and third millennia B.C., including social structure, communications, bureaucratic organization, religion, and technology.

In eleven thematic sections, the exhibition maps chronologically the establishment and great achievements of Minoan culture. Here the viewer can explore the historical and cultural context of this celebrated society and gain insight into its mysteries, such as the legends surrounding the reign of King Minos of Knossos, who commissioned the fabled Labyrinth of Greek mythology.

Most of these pieces have never been seen outside of Crete, so if you’re planning on being in the Northeast US between March 13 and September 13, you might want to make a point of visiting.

Remember: Minoans are reknown not just for the legendary labyrinth designed by Daedalus, the bull dancers, queen Pasiphae having sex with a bull and giving birth to the Minotaur, but also for topless babes. That place was lousy with breastseses.

Just sayin’, in case it sweetens the deal for anyone.

The Amber Room? For reals?

Modern(ish), Treasures

It seems like a long shot to me, but some German treasure hunters think they’ve found the fabled Amber Room in a cavern 65 feet underground.

The discovery of an estimated two tonnes of gold was made at the weekend when electromagnetic pulse measurements located the man-made cavern 20 meters underground near the village of Deutschneudorf on Germany’s border with the Czech Republic.

The team, which used heavy digging equipment, hasn’t been inside the room but analysis of the electromagnetic test has led it to believe that the cavern contains gold.

“I’m well over 90 percent sure we have found the Amber Room,” the mayor of Deutschneudorf, Heinz-Peter Haustein, who led the search, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “The chamber is likely to be part of a labyrinth of storage rooms that the Nazis built here. I knew it was in this area. I just never knew exactly where.”

The Amber Room was made of 55 square meters of etched and mosaic amber panels backed with gold. A gift from Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I to Czar Peter the Great in 1716, it lived in the Catherine Palace until Nazi troops stripped it and shipped it back to East Prussia where it was on display in Königsberg Castle until 1945.

Then it disappeared. Nobody’s sure what happened. Königsberg was hit pretty hard at the end of the war, and the amber was already brittle before it was stripped from the walls in Leningrad.

Then there are theories about it having been packed into a submarine that sank in the Baltic, or stashed in a mineshaft, or hidden in underground cave networks along with piles of other Nazi loot. Hence our current treasure-hunting friends.

Meanwhile, back in St. Petersburg, the Amber Room has been painstakingly recreated. It took Russian artisans and historians, $8 million in German corporate funds, 25 years and 6 tons of amber to do it, but do it they did. Here’s a wall from the recreated Amber Room that gives a sense of its lavish beauty and detail:

Ancient city discovered in India

Ancient

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a fortified urban center which flourished 2,500 years ago in the eastern state of Orissa in India.

Researchers say the items found during the excavation point to a highly developed urban settlement.

The population of the city could have been in the region of 20,000 to 25,000, the archaeologists claim.

The excavations include 18 stone pillars, pottery, terracotta ornaments and bangles, finger rings, ear spools and pendants made of clay.

The estimates of population size and period are very much speculative at this point, however. Only a small fraction of the city has been excavated so far. Unfortunately, most of the area within the fortifications is privately owned, so there’s a chance it will remain unexcavated, especially since sprawl is pushing development dangerously close to the perimeter.

Freud’s final resting vase

Ancient, Modern(ish)

I came across a delightful series of podcasts offered by a Syndey radio station called Self Improvement Wednesday.

This week, I learned that Sigmund Freud had a huge antiquities collection, and was in fact buried in a red-figured, 4th c. BC Greek vase.

Okay, his ashes were, but still, that’s really something because even though these vases might have been used for exactly that purpose in the Etruscan graves from whence they were unearthed, they hadn’t been en vogue as cremation urns for several millennia by the time Freud passed away in 1939.

Listen to the podcast. It’s short and sweet and really fascinating. You’ll find out about how he had 2,500 antiquities in his collection and just 3,500 books in his library. You’ll also hear about his friendship with Princess Marie Bonaparte who gave him the vase in which he and his wife Martha currently reside and helped get him out Austria after the Anschluss.

Then there’s the bit about Athena’s missing spear, and Thoth’s giant member, but I’ll leave that to you to discover.

For more info on Freud’s antiquities collection, see the Freud Museum in London.