Taste of Life: Chocolates, candies and forever love

By the nineteenth century, the celebration had taken on an increasingly commercial character, driven in part by the expanding global chocolate industry

Valentine’s Day has long been associated with expressions of love exchanged through thoughtful gifts, affectionate notes, and quiet moments shared over candlelit dinners. The day was shaped by evolving ideas of romance, gender, and desire, with the Victorians giving it new visibility through grand gestures and carefully chosen presents.

Access to chocolate was once a marker of elite power, closely linked to masculinity and physical strength, and before the Industrial Revolution, it remained the preserve of the wealthy alone. (HT)

By the nineteenth century, the celebration had taken on an increasingly commercial character, driven in part by the expanding global chocolate industry. In colonial India, Valentine’s Day entered public life subtly, through decorated shop windows, newspaper advertisements, and the growing appeal of sugar and chocolate as symbols of intimacy and modern romance.

Nineteenth-century Poona was an important military centre, with several regiments stationed in and around the city. Compared to Bombay and Calcutta, however, it had far fewer civic offices and institutions, as well as European-style shops. Most Europeans living in India sent their children back to their homeland for education, and the number of Anglo-Indian students enrolled in local colleges was very small. As a result, celebrations such as Valentine’s Day, which were common in Europe and America, did not take deep root in the city.

Yet, by the nineteenth century, the growing commercial value of the occasion began to make itself felt even in Poona.

On February 2, 1896, a Bombay newspaper published an advertisement disguised as a news item. It read – “It is curious to note the ingenuity with which chocolate-manufacturers contrive to present this wholesome and delicious sweetmeat in a tempting variety of forms. Messrs Cadbury offer us daintily got-up boxes of chocolate creams with various flavours, a present greatly appreciated by children, and, indeed, by many adults of the softer sex. Their chocolate-almonds, too, are delicious for dessert, and are also their Mexican chocolate, ordinarily sold in bars.”

In 1868, Richard Cadbury created one of the fancy boxes in the shape of a heart for Valentine’s Day. Cadbury had just refined its manufacturing process to separate pure cocoa butter from whole cocoa beans, creating a drinking chocolate far smoother and more appealing than anything most Britons had known. This innovation also left the company with a surplus of cocoa butter, which was cleverly channelled into developing a wider range of solid, or “eating,” chocolates. Sensing the commercial potential of these new products, Cadbury turned his attention to marketing, presenting the chocolates in attractively designed boxes of his own creation and transforming them into desirable gifts as well as confections. Boxes of chocolates, heart-shaped and otherwise, quickly became widely associated with the holiday. These boxes featured motifs like red hearts, flying angels, and roses, and were used to store mementoes like love letters and strands of hair after the chocolates were eaten.

The advertorial in the Bombay newspaper was clearly aimed at increasing the sale of chocolates around Valentine’s Day. Below it was another advertisement placed by Messrs Treacher & Co, letting the readers know that their shops in Bombay and Poona had more than adequate stock of freshly imported chocolates and an assortment of sweets like tarts and lozenges for Valentine’s Day.

Philip & Company, beginning early 1880s, placed advertisements in several Bombay newspapers every January and February announcing the arrival of a “wide variety of high-grade Chocolates, Sherbets, Pan Work, Gum Work, Cream Work, Pure Sugar Lozenges, Wafers, Hard Candies, Chocolate covered Cream Bars and Penny Chocolates” in their shops in Bombay and Poona on the occasion of Valentine’s Day. They boastfully declared that their “conversation lozenges” were adorned with the “best poems”.

“Conversation lozenges” were popular among courting couples. These lozenges were heart-shaped candies with messages printed on them, such as “Will you be my sweetheart?” If a man presented a woman with a conversation lozenge and she did not throw it back at him, the romance was on its way.

In the early twentieth century, “Conversation Hearts” made their entry in the Poona market. These heart-shaped conversation candies had messages printed on them and were invented by brothers Silas and Daniel Chase.

On February 13, 1911, “The Bombay Gazette” reported that several shops in Poona had their windows devoted to the display of valentines. Perfumes and confectionery adorned Valentine’s displays. The “Practical Druggist and Review of Reviews” advised shopkeepers in February 1910 that “remembrances that appealed to the gustatory sense as well as to the eye were doubly acceptable, and those sweets were always welcomed by sweethearts – and there was more profit in the sale of a pound of 80-cent candy than in that of a 50-cent creation of lithographs and paper lace”.

Love and sex have long been associated with sweetness. Valentine’s Day was among the confectioners’ special days as sweets came to symbolise men’s romantic interest in women. Confectionery and chocolate manufacturers sold the idea that the best way to woo a lady on Valentine’s Day was to gift her sweets, especially chocolates.

Access to chocolate was once a marker of elite power, closely linked to masculinity and physical strength, and before the Industrial Revolution, it remained the preserve of the wealthy alone. As sugar became increasingly available from the early modern period, much of it produced through slave labour, sweetened cacao gradually entered everyday diets.

By the nineteenth century, sugar had become a mass commodity, bringing chocolate within reach of the working classes, women included. At the same time, enlightenment thinkers advanced ideas that cast women as naturally inclined towards sweet and indulgent foods, notions that were absorbed into bourgeois ideals and domestic life, especially within the Victorian family. As chocolate became part of women’s daily consumption, its cultural meaning shifted away from male privilege towards a distinctly feminine identity, with preference hardening into expectation and women themselves coming to be described as “sweet” in temperament as well as in taste.

Advertisements in Poona and Bombay newspapers generously used the adjective “dainty” to describe confections. It became associated with women by representing an idealised Victorian-era standard of femininity, emphasising delicacy, fragility, smallness, and refined grace. Everything connected with women was also “dainty”: the dainty sandwiches and cakes they served, the dainty cups of cocoa and tea they drank, and even the dainty tea gowns they wore.

Shops not only stocked themselves with “dainty” confections to win over the love of a lady, but also rare, distinctive, or exotic items that signalled the giver’s wealth and social standing. Spices such as nutmeg and fruits like oranges carried strong associations of rarity, refinement, and affection and were always in demand in February.

Chinmay Damle is a research scientist and food enthusiast. He writes here on Pune’s food culture. He can be contacted at chinmay.damle@gmail.com