<P> After the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, chocolate was imported to Europe . There, it quickly became a court favorite . It was still served as a beverage, but the Spanish added sugar or honey to counteract the natural bitterness . The Spaniards initially intended to recreate the original taste of the Mesoamerican chocolate by adding similar spices, but this habit had faded away by the end of the eighteenth century . Within about a hundred years, chocolate established a foothold throughout Europe . </P> <P> How the word "chocolate" came into Spanish is not certain . The authority on the Spanish language, the Royal Spanish Academy, derives it from the Nahuatl word "xocolatl" (pronounced (ʃoˈkolaːtɬ)) made up from the words "xococ" meaning sour or bitter, and "atl" meaning water or drink . However, as William Bright noted the word "chocolatl" doesn't occur in central Mexican colonial sources making this an unlikely derivation . Santamaria gives a derivation from the Yucatec Maya word "chokol" meaning hot, and the Nahuatl "atl" meaning water . More recently Dakin and Wichman derive it from another Nahuatl term, "chicolatl" from Eastern Nahuatl meaning "beaten drink". They derive this term from the word for the frothing stick, "chicoli". The word xocoatl means beverage of maize . The words "cacaua atl" mean drink of cacao . The word "xocolatl" does not appear in Molina's dictionary . </P> <P> The new craze for chocolate brought with it a thriving slave market, as between the early 17th and late 19th centuries the laborious and slow processing of the cacao bean was manual . Cacao plantations spread, as the English, Dutch, and French colonized and planted . With the depletion of Mesoamerican workers, largely to disease, cacao production was often the work of poor wage laborers and African slaves . Wind - powered and horse - drawn mills were used to speed production, augmenting human labor . Heating the working areas of the table - mill, an innovation that emerged in France in 1732, also assisted in extraction . The Chocolaterie Lombart, created in 1760, claimed to be the first chocolate company in France, ten years before Pelletier et Pelletier . </P> <P> New processes that speed the production of chocolate emerged early in the Industrial Revolution . In 1815, Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten introduced alkaline salts to chocolate, which reduced its bitterness . A few years thereafter, in 1828, he created a press to remove about half the natural fat (cacao butter) from chocolate liquor, which made chocolate both cheaper to produce and more consistent in quality . This innovation introduced the modern era of chocolate . Known as "Dutch cocoa", this machine - pressed chocolate was instrumental in the transformation of chocolate to its solid form when in 1847 Joseph Fry learned to make chocolate moldable by adding back melted cacao butter . Milk had sometimes been used as an addition to chocolate beverages since the mid-17th century, but in 1875 Daniel Peter invented milk chocolate by mixing a powdered milk developed by Henri Nestlé with the liquor . In 1879, the texture and taste of chocolate was further improved when Rodolphe Lindt invented the conching machine . </P>

How have the products of the cacao tree changed from the time of montezuma to the present