For the passed few years, we have been renting a house in the pleasant south Birmingham suburb of Selly Oak. Just on our borders is the village of Bournville, once a rural farmland area, but developed by the Cadbury family around their famous chocolate factory. So today we took advantage of one of our last opportunities to walk around the corner and have a tour around the factory, gaining all important insights into the chocolate making process. Of course, the exact recipe is a closely guarded secret, but we are told enough on the tour to realise its a complicated business.
The tour begins in the Amazon rainforest, where the Mayan people (of
Apocalypto fame) sacrifice each other to their many gods in order to ensure a good cocoa crop. Then they start trading with their Aztec neighbours, who will give a slave in exchange for a hundred cocoa beans. Then comes the Spaniard explorers, who sample the curious chocolate drink and take it back to Europe. Their own modified recipe left out the chilli spices of their South American friends, and replaced it with nutmeg and sugar. It was a closely guarded secret until Spanish royalty married into the French court. Very soon we were all guzzling chocolate drink over the latest high society gossip and gambling.
But the chocolate story only really gets underway when cocoa beans become cheap enough for the Cadbury brothers to take over their father’s little Birmingham shop, and establish a huge chocolate factory, mass-producing chocolate with their famous blend of full fat dairy milk with chocolate. Yum. The rest is history. But the thing I found particularly fascinating was the way the Cadbury brothers blended their Quaker-christian values with their sly business sense: Their goal was to establish a whole community away from smoggy Birmingham, in the countryside, nearby the main rail and canal networks. They named it after the Bourn-brook which flows passed the area: Bournville. They were responsible for schools, churches, a swimming pool, cricket green, and most importantly good quality housing for their workforce. The Bournville Village Trust still exists today to continue the work which they began. We could learn a lot from this sense of community working together, especially when considering the breakdown of social fabric prevalent today; with gang rule and drunken yobbishness dominating many of Birmingham's streets.
The day was really about chocolate, of course. As well as Wendy and I, Maddy was tucking into the complimentary dairy milk with great gusto. We got to see the packing factory where sumptuous liquid chocolate turns into freshly wrapped bars. And we even got to go on a ‘Cadabra’ ride whereby we saw miniature cocoa bean people in 'Beanville' enjoying life to the full (presumably before being liquidised). I wonder if the late great Cardinal John Henry Newman would have ever sampled the luscious chocolate of the nearby Bournville factory. Lets hope our new home is in an area of equally prestigious Brummie heritage!
For the passed few years, we have been renting a house in the pleasant south Birmingham suburb of Selly Oak. Just on our borders is the village of Bournville, once a rural farmland area, but developed by the Cadbury family around their famous chocolate factory. So today we took advantage of one of our last opportunities to walk around the corner and have a tour around the factory, gaining all important insights into the chocolate making process. Of course, the exact recipe is a closely guarded secret, but we are told enough on the tour to realise its a complicated business.
The tour begins in the Amazon rainforest, where the Mayan people (of Apocalypto fame) sacrifice each other to their many gods in order to ensure a good cocoa crop. Then they start trading with their Aztec neighbours, who will give a slave in exchange for a hundred cocoa beans. Then comes the Spaniard explorers, who sample the curious chocolate drink and take it back to Europe. Their own modified recipe left out the chilli spices of their South American friends, and replaced it with nutmeg and sugar. It was a closely guarded secret until Spanish royalty married into the French court. Very soon we were all guzzling chocolate drink over the latest high society gossip and gambling.
But the chocolate story only really gets underway when cocoa beans become cheap enough for the Cadbury brothers to take over their father’s little Birmingham shop, and establish a huge chocolate factory, mass-producing chocolate with their famous blend of full fat dairy milk with chocolate. Yum. The rest is history. But the thing I found particularly fascinating was the way the Cadbury brothers blended their Quaker-christian values with their sly business sense: Their goal was to establish a whole community away from smoggy Birmingham, in the countryside, nearby the main rail and canal networks. They named it after the Bourn-brook which flows passed the area: Bournville. They were responsible for schools, churches, a swimming pool, cricket green, and most importantly good quality housing for their workforce. The Bournville Village Trust still exists today to continue the work which they began. We could learn a lot from this sense of community working together, especially when considering the breakdown of social fabric prevalent today; with gang rule and drunken yobbishness dominating many of Birmingham's streets.
The day was really about chocolate, of course. As well as Wendy and I, Maddy was tucking into the complimentary dairy milk with great gusto. We got to see the packing factory where sumptuous liquid chocolate turns into freshly wrapped bars. And we even got to go on a ‘Cadabra’ ride whereby we saw miniature cocoa bean people in 'Beanville' enjoying life to the full (presumably before being liquidised). I wonder if the late great Cardinal John Henry Newman would have ever sampled the luscious chocolate of the nearby Bournville factory. Lets hope our new home is in an area of equally prestigious Brummie heritage! 
Maddy and the chocolate factory? =) Anyway, I love Cadbury's Fruit and Nut... especially during Lent... mmmmm
ReplyDeleteI wish I had been with you; the process of getting something edible out of Cocoa pods fascinates me.
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