The chocolate houses
For roughly a century, chocolate in Europe was drunk in public rooms that were more expensive and more exclusive than coffee houses — and several of them turned into gentlemen's clubs, which is where their names survive.
Chocolate arrived in northern Europe as a drink for people with money and time, and the institution that grew around it reflected that. Chocolate houses appeared in London from the mid-seventeenth century and spread; they served a prepared hot drink, and they functioned as places for conversation, news, politics and — increasingly — gambling.
They are usually described alongside coffee houses and were meaningfully different from them. Coffee houses were comparatively cheap and famously open, with a reputation as places where a man of modest means could sit and argue. Chocolate was dearer, the rooms were more exclusive, and admission was in practice restricted by price and often by subscription.
That exclusivity is why several did not remain public rooms at all. The most successful hardened into private members' clubs over the eighteenth century, retaining the names they had traded under, and the club names that survive in London are the fossil record of the trade.
The drink itself remained close to its Iberian form for a long time — ground cacao prepared with water or milk, spiced, sweetened, frothed and served hot. What changed the institution in the end was not fashion but manufacturing: once chocolate could be pressed, moulded and eaten, the reason to go somewhere to drink it weakened.
- Period
- Mid-seventeenth to eighteenth centuries
- Region
- London, Paris and other European cities
- Kind of record
- Documented history
Significance
It is the social form chocolate took in Europe before it became a manufactured product, and the reason chocolate carried aristocratic associations into the industrial era.
Related
History and culture
- How Europe learned to drink chocolateHow the drink reached Europe in the first place.
- Chocolate at courtThe courtly setting chocolate occupied before and alongside the public rooms.
- British chocolate historyWhat British chocolate became after the houses.
- The invention of the industrial barThe manufacturing shift that ended the drink's social monopoly.
- Drinking chocolateThe product these rooms existed to serve.
Sources
- The True History of Chocolate — Thames & Hudson(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)