by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, February 12, 2021.
A few months after taking office in 1789, President George Washington took a tour of the New England states. His diary entry after his visit to Exeter had this to say about the town’s industries: “Above (but in the town) are considerable falls, which supply several grist mills, 2 oyle mills, a slitting mill, and snuff mill.” It’s slightly disappointing that he didn’t mention a chocolate mill. New Englanders, we are told, were crazy about drinking chocolate in the early republic. But was it popular in Exeter? After all, if we’re to time travel back, we’ll need chocolate.
We can thank the people of the western hemisphere for chocolate. Cacao was grown in Mesoamerica for thousands of years before the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century. Early descriptions are of a frothy, bitter, spicy drink, which sounds utterly delicious. Europeans added sugar and milk to produce the sweet drink we know today as hot chocolate or cocoa.
The cacao does not give up its flavor easily. A cacao pod is about the size of a summer squash (another new world food) and, when ripe, is a yellowish to brownish color. Crack it open and you’ll find the sticky cacao beans, which look like slippery garlic cloves. These are removed and fermented until they resemble sticky kidney beans. For easier transportation, they are dried. This is most likely the way they arrived in New England ports. Shortly after the Spaniards imported cocoa beans from Mesoamerica, France and England began cultivation on the islands of the West Indies. Like all other products from the region, cocoa was primarily planted, tended and harvested by enslaved people kidnapped from the west coast of Africa. To say our love of chocolate has a fraught history, would be an understatement.
After arriving in a local port – most likely Portsmouth – cocoa beans would arrive in Exeter. Although President Washington missed it, there was a chocolate mill in Exeter. An advertisement in the Exeter Chronicle in 1784 boasts: “Chocolate of the first quality, made by Thomas Durant, at his mill in Exeter, and sold as cheap as can be purchased in any of the New-England States.” As mentioned earlier, cocoa beans require a lot of effort to reach their deliciousness. The dried beans are roasted, much like coffee beans, and then crushed and winnowed into nibs, which have a mulch-like appearance. This is then ground into liquor. To make it drinkable, it has to be heated to release the fat globs (called “cocoa butter” to sound appealing) and whisked into a froth. Maria Eliza Rundell, the London-based author of “A New System of Domestic Cookery” – a book so popular in both England and the United States that an edition was even published in Exeter, NH – described the process of making drinking chocolate in 1810 as follows (read this with a high-pitched English accent for more fun). “Cut a cake of chocolate in very small bits; put a pint of water into the pot, and, when it boils, put in the above: mill it off the fire until quite melted, then on a gentle fire till it boil; pour into a basin, and it will keep in a cool place eight or ten days, or more. When wanted, put a spoonful or two into milk, boil it with sugar, and mill it well. This, if not made thick, is a very good breakfast or supper.”
The ‘milling’ Rundell describes is achieved by using a tool called a molinillo – a turned wooden whisk. It doesn’t look like the wire whisks we use today, it looks more like an angry honey dipper. Traditional to Mexico, they are hand carved and meant to be used by rapidly spinning it between the palms of the hands. You can do the same thing with a wire whisk, but it’s less authentic.
Thomas Durant’s chocolate mill, however, was more industrial. His task was to remove the husks, grind the remains into nibs, crush the nibs to release the cocoa butter and then dry the results into bricks (or as Rundell described ‘cakes’) of solid chocolate. His mill was somewhere in Exeter, but we don’t know where. We have no maps for 1784 and we’ve been unable to trace Thomas Durant at all. The only Durant recorded in Exeter at that time was Samuel Durant. However, shortly after Washington’s visit, Thomas Dwight, the president of Yale College, passed through town and noted, “At a small distance above the town, the Squamscut is joined by another stream, called Little River. On these waters are erected eight grist-mills, six saw-mills, two oil-mills, two chocolate-mills, two fulling-mills, one paper-mill, one snuff-mill, one slitting-mill and a furnace. In summer, however, there is sufficient water for the grist-mills and fulling-mills only.”
The chocolate mills are also mentioned the American Gazetteer, published in 1797 by Jedidiah Morse. Exeter’s earliest accurate map, made in 1802 by Phineas Merrill, lists many mills on Little River, but fails to mention what was being produced at them. It’s possible that chocolate alternated with other products such as snuff. In any case, chocolate production was limited to the rainier months when the river was high enough to turn the mill wheel.
After the turn of the century, there are no longer any mentions of chocolate mills in Exeter. In 1818, Joseph Fernald recorded transporting chocolate for James Smith from Portsmouth to Exeter by gundalow. It arrived in a ‘bundle,’ which sounds less like a sack of cocoa beans and more like a package of processed chocolate ‘cakes’ or ‘bricks.’ This being February, a month with an acknowledged chocolate holiday, try making hot chocolate from scratch. There are plenty of recipes online – find one with a dash of chili to spice it up and pause for a moment to consider the hard journey chocolate has made to our tables.
Barbara Rimkunas is curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Support the Exeter Historical Society by becoming a member! Join online at: www.exeterhistory.org.
Image: Advertisement from the Exeter Chronicle July 8th, 1784 indicates there was a chocolate mill in Exeter.