Chocolate
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Chocolate. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a preparation of the seeds of Theobroma cacao, made by grinding the seeds mixed with water to a very fine paste. The mill is usually constructed of heavy metal rollers turning in a circular course upon a flat metal plate. A curved knife or scoop is attached to the rollers in such wise that it shall return the paste continually to be crushed and recrushed by the rollers until it becomes almost impalpable. The object of this is to render the nut, otherwise difficult of solution, readily diffusible in water or milk when used as a beverage. The paste when unmixed, or mixed only with flour or other farinaceous material, is usually called cocoa, but when much sugar or spices such as vanilla, cinnamon, etc., are added, it bears the name of chocolate. The two names are much confounded commercially. Chocolate is molded into cakes or sold in powder or flakes formed by simply drying the paste as it comes from the mill. The seeds or nuts contain a large proportion (30 to 50 per cent.) of oily matter (cocoa butter). This may be partially removed or all retained in the chocolate. In the latter case much of it is mechanically adherent to the sugar or farinaceous matter. Chocolate is a favorite beverage in Spain, Italy, and other S. countries, especially for breakfast; the cake or powder is heated and diffused in water or milk with much stirring. The Italian rarely uses butter, but cuts his bread into sippets and dips them in his chocolate, the oily matter of which performs the same nutritive functions as the butter we spread on our bread. It is sometimes mixed with coffee in Italy, and there known as mischiata. It is also made into a paste with cream and sugar and frozen as Chocolate ice. Vanilla is the favorite flavoring. The name appears to be Mexican, Chocolatl (choco, "cocoa," and latl, "water"). It was introduced from America to Europe by the Spaniards. It is highly nutritious, containing a large proportion of nitrogenous flesh-forming material. On this account it is used as portable food by many mountaineers. An excessively rich food is obtained by preparing it with milk and then whisking in a raw egg. In the solid form, mixed with much sugar, cream, and various confections, Chocolate is largely used as a sweetmeat, and is introduced in pastry.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
. See Cocoa
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 chocolate was still described first as a drink — a breakfast beverage of Spain and Italy — with the solid "sweetmeat" a secondary use; today the reverse is true almost everywhere, and the eating bar, moulded and conched, is the default form. The cocoa itself has moved continents: the crop the Spaniards took out of America is now grown overwhelmingly in West Africa, with Ivory Coast and Ghana together supplying roughly two-thirds of world beans, an industry dogged since the 1990s by documented child labour on smallholdings. Collier's praise of chocolate as "highly nutritious, containing a large proportion of nitrogenous flesh-forming material" has not survived: nutritionists now class it chiefly as fat and sugar, though research since the 1990s on cocoa flavanols and blood pressure has given the bean a modest scientific rehabilitation. The Theobroma cacao genome was sequenced in 2010, opening breeding work against the fungal diseases that periodically threaten supply.
Written for this edition, 2026.