Hot Stuff: Chocolate and the US Navy

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.  Besides flowers and cards, probably more chocolate changes hands on this day than any other of the year.  While sailors in the early American Navy could probably do without greeting cards and fresh-cut flowers, they could hardly live without chocolate.

While we consume millions of pounds of the stuff today, it most often comes in solid form, molded into a bar or some bit-sized morsel.  But it the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, people usually took their chocolate as a hot drink, often for breakfast.  So popular had it become, that by 1785 Thomas Jefferson could write, “the superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain." Read the full story on Log Lines >>