Swiss Chocolate

Because you can't talk about Switzerland without chocolate coming up :)

From Frommer's "Food & Drink in Switzerland":

Chocolate Superpower

Cocoa beans are chocolate's raw ingredients. First publicized in Europe by Columbus, who noticed them growing on trees in Nicaragua in 1502, they were traded as currency by the conquistadores in the New World, who viewed them as an elixir of physical strength. Back in Spain, royal cooks mixed the pulverized beans with sugar and hot water and served them with great success to the royal family. The Spanish-born Anne of Austria introduced it to the French court at her dinner parties after her marriage to Louis XIII. And in a kind of chain reaction to the bean's original "discovery," London's first chocolate shop was established by a Frenchman in 1657.

Nineteenth-century attitudes about chocolate (as perceived in North America and in Europe) were widely different. In 1825, the leading culinarian of the French-speaking world (Brillat-Savarin) declared that chocolate was one of the most effective restoratives of physical and intellectual powers known to man. In contrast, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American-born moral crusader and woman of letters, declared chocolate unfit for proper American tables, and -- in a burst of prudishness -- commented suspiciously on its French and Spanish origins.

Despite Ms. Stowe's invectives, the market for chocolate continued to grow. This fact was immediately noticed by the canny Swiss from their politically neutral bastion in the Alps.

From the early 1800s, the Swiss began investing heavily in what they perceived as a long-range moneymaker. Pioneers of the industry opened the country's first chocolate factory in 1819 at Corsier, near Vevey. What's now a massive multinational concern, Suchard, was established near Neuchâtel in 1824. In 1875, Swiss-born Daniel Peter invented milk chocolate by adding condensed milk to his brew of pulverized cocoa and sugar. In 1879, the first chocolate bar was created (the Lindt Surfin bar). In 1899, the Sprungli and Lindt empires merged into a Zurich-based chocolate-making dynasty. The Tobler and Nestlé organizations were founded shortly afterward.

Switzerland today is the largest chocolate superpower in the world, leading the globe in production. Both secrecy and precision have always been cited as Swiss virtues, and both of these qualities are required during a complicated blending process that transforms the raw ingredients into the final product. The allure is aesthetic as well as gastronomic: Swiss consumers expect new artwork on their chocolate wrappers at frequent intervals, and an army of commercial artists labors at yearly intervals to comply. The Swiss eat and drink more chocolate per capita than any other nation in the world, fueling their bodies for the bone-chilling temperatures of the alpine climate. (No self-respecting mountain climber ever embarks without the requisite chocolate bars.) Swiss factories maintain "chocolate breaks" for sugar-induced bursts of energy, and swiss housewives usually don't buy less than a kilo of chocolate at a time.

Read more:   http://www.frommers.com/destinations/switzerland/798116#sthash.SlK40VpY.dpbs#ixzz34gQu9bZI

xoxo,

     Rebecca