This card celebrated the fact that chocolate is both something we eat and something we drink, and, more than that, the fact that the drinking came along many centuries before the eating was ever imagined.
During the late 1940s, Kwatta gained a name for themselves with a superb selection of film star cards. However this postcard comes from an earlier time, and it is included here because chocolate, when first discovered, was not something to eat, only to drink.
That all started with the Mayans, in Mexico and Central America. Somehow they discovered that if you somehow broke down the hard shell and ground the large beans that grew all over the area, you could mix it with water and it would kind of flavour the drink. Today we would not consider it very palatable, and nor did they, so they started mixing it with chillies and other spices, which gave it a novelty value if did nothing for the taste. It then moved into Europe when the Mayans were conquered, and their wares plundered. This was when the chillies etc were removed, but on finding any form of taste lacking, sugar, or honey, was added to sweeten it.
It was not until the 1820s that chocolate was eaten and not drunk. For that we can thank a familiar name, Coenraad van Houten, from Amsterdam, who invented a machine to press the cocoa bean and separate it into two parts. the fat, which he did not want, and the powdery grain, which he did. However he did not make this into a bar of chocolate, he just made a finer, less fatty, chocolate drink. For those who needed fattening up, like invalids, it was recommended that milk be added. Which is where we get the idea of milk with hot chocolate today.
For the bar of chocolate, we have to thank someone else - and they come along tomorrow....