Boston’s Old North Church Offers a Delightful Demonstration

Boston's Old North Church is famous for Paul Revere's ride. (Ajay Suresh/CC BY SA 2.0)

The Old North Church is high atop must-see lists for visitors to historic Boston, Massachusetts. Located on Salem Street and surrounded by brick buildings in a quiet area of the city’s North End, the church, built in 1723, gained notoriety on the evening of April 18, 1775.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

That fateful night was memorialized in the 1903 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It recounted the tale of when the church sexton Robert Newman and vestryman Capt. John Pulling, Jr. climbed the steeple and held high two lanterns as a signal from Paul Revere that the British were marching to Lexington and Concord by sea across the Charles River and not by land.

That act at Old North Church helped ignite the American Revolution. Boston’s oldest surviving church building thus became the city’s most visited historical site. Upwards of half a million people walk through its doors annually. It’s well worth seeing—so is a meander into Clough House, an adjoining brick building that houses the visitor’s center. It’s here that tourists and Bostonians alike will discover an exceptional demonstration of how chocolate was first made.

I was immediately fascinated. People dressed in authentic 18th-century garb give daily presentations to visitors. Their subjects: the history of chocolate in the colonies and the steps taken to transform cacao pods into chocolate blocks and drinkable chocolate.

Boston produced enormous quantities of chocolate that were sold throughout the 13 colonies and even exported to England. Starting around 1720, more than a dozen “chocolate houses” existed throughout the city.

Early explorers learned that ingredients such as cacao, sugar, and chili pepper were grown by indigenous peoples to make a chocolate drink. The edible chocolate bars we are familiar with today weren’t affordable or mass produced until the late 1800s.

How It Was Made

Making chocolate in the 18th century was labor intensive; as a result, it was an expensive a luxury item. Making chocolate required patience, specialized knowledge, and skill. Cacao pods are a fruit that can grow as large as a football. Once the pods are harvested, the pulp and seeds (beans) must be scooped out and then dried. Roasting them for about an hour enhances their flavor.

The demonstrator showed how a hand-woven winnowing basket separated outer shells from the beans, which break into large pieces called cacao nibs. These nibs are ground finely using a large mortar and pestle.

One of the final stages that the reenactors demonstrated involved a stone-surface metate, which originated with the Aztecs and was used by the colonists. It was positioned over a bed of coals. An individual patiently used a stone mano tool to slowly grind the cacao over the heated metate. This turned it into a cacao butter paste. They put this paste into a mold to dry into a long-lasting chocolate block.

Eaten alone, ground cacao is bitter. Sugar was added to make it appealing, but colonists often included a touch of vanilla, orange peel, nutmeg, cinnamon, or chili pepper to further enhance flavor. When making a chocolate drink or using the chocolate for other recipes, they grated the hard cake or block.

In the 1700s, special chocolate pots were filled with grated chocolate, sugar, and hot water. A frothing stick mixed it all together into a thick, rich beverage. Since chocolate was so expensive and tedious to make into a drink, Boston’s elite served it in very small cups and savored it slowly.

Of course, I couldn’t continue on Boston’s Freedom Trail until I tried the fresh-made chocolate drink and purchased wrapped and ready-to-go chocolate fashioned from 18th-century recipes. Experiencing this aspect of Boston was historical immersion that satisfied my culinary sensibilities.

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