For nearly all of chocolate’s history, it was a drink, not a snack. The Aztecs sipped it, then the Spanish, then the English. The idea of biting chocolate hadn’t really occurred to anyone yet. To make solid bars, you needed extra cocoa butter, and nobody had worked out a good way to add it.
In 1847, an English chocolate maker called J.S. Fry & Sons figured it out. By mixing cocoa powder, sugar, and extra melted cocoa butter, they made a paste that could be poured into a mould and set hard. The result was the world’s first chocolate bar - gritty, very bitter, and not nearly as nice as today’s chocolate.
Thirty years later, a Swiss chocolatier named Daniel Peter mixed in powdered milk and invented milk chocolate, which is what most kids today think of as “normal” chocolate. From those two inventions - the solid bar and the milk recipe - came the entire modern chocolate industry.
