During the whole next century, the Spanish guarded their very precious monopoly of cacao and commerce of chocolate but in 1606 this ended by Antonio Carletti, who took the secret of the preparation with him. Exiled Jews and monks took the recipe to France with them and it became very popular in that country when the Spanish princess Ana of Austria, who was passionate about chocolate and who had a maid who prepared the drink for her, married Luis XIII of France.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cacao grains constituted as the main source of commercial exchange in Central America. As a result only the very rich could allow themselves the luxury of drinking chocolate since, for the ordinary people, drinking it was equal to drinking their money. A rabbit, and a woman for one night cost ten grains, whereas a slave that was considered “a good slave” was sold at the bargain price of one hundred grains. An English man found the way to use these grains as money, said “Blessed money, that excuses its possessors of greed, since it does not allow them to accumulate it or bury it in the ground”.
The first time chocolate was mentioned in London seem to have been in 1657, when a note in the Public Advertiser appeared that said “In Queen’s Head alley, next to Bishopgate St., in the house of a French man, there is a sale of an excellent drink of Occidental India (America) called Chocolate. There you can drink it prepared at any hour, at reasonable prices”. The price was around ten to fifteen shillings per pound, which severely limited the number of people that could afford it.
From the beginning very high taxes had to paid for these grains. Towards the end of the XVIII century the tax ascended to five shillings per pound of any grains imported from a non-British country, and this tax was not reduced until 1853, in which then it was two pennies per lb that for first time, along with the new manufacturing methods, made chocolate much more available to the general public.
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