We have the Cadburys to thank for this whole “chocolates for Valentine’s Day” thing. Don’t get me wrong—a lot of other stuff led up to it: the ancient Romans and their winter fertility festivals; the beheading of St. Valentine on February 14 after he defied the rule of Emperor Claudius and married Roman soldiers. Then, there was Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote in his medieval poem “Parliament of Fowl” that English birds mated on Valentine’s Day—”For this was on the seynt Valentynes Day, Whan every foul cometh there to chese his makes”—making every 14th-century couple start whispering sweet nothings to each other before dying of the bubonic plague, or whatever. (It was a dark time.) Two hundred years later, Shakespeare firmly cemented this love bird concept in A Midsummer’s Night Dream: “Good morrow, friends! Saint Valentine is past. Begin these wood-birds but a couple now?”
But I digress. This sweet tradition of gifting chocolates on January 14? It’s because of Richard Cadbury, who in 1860, opened a chocolate shop in Leeds. In a marketing push to sell his newest product—bon bons—he made a lacy, heart-shaped box to resemble Valentine’s Day cards that were currently all the rage in Victorian England. Soon, they became more popular to gift than cards themselves. “The custom of sending presents of a more substantial character on February 14th obtains in some parts of England, and is highly commendable,” read an 1895 article in the Cambridge Weekly News. “The enamored swain who sends a pair of gloves (English manufacture guaranteed), or a box of Chocolate (Cadbury’s or Fry’s not French)…would be much appreciated and ought to be encouraged.”
Not to be outdone, Milton Hersey—then a burgeoning chocolate entrepreneur from Pennslyvania—created the foiled-wrapped Hershey Kiss in 1907 to mass fanfare. But he was, in fact, outdone in the 1930s by Russell Stover who sold affordable chocolates in his own Cadbury-inspired container across 2,000 department stores in the Midwest. The same decade, Jean Harlow ate a box of chocolates while lounging in lingerie on a heart-shaped pillow in Dinner at Eight. Chocolate and romance were forever linked.
According to the National Confectioners Association, Americans today buy over 58 million pounds of chocolate for Valentine’s Day. And they have plenty of more options beyond a classic heart-shaped box. Over in Los Angeles, Burdick’s chocolate is hard at work handmaking their chocolate mice, piping cinnamon filling into the white chocolate ones and espresso filling into their milk. “They have a lot of personalities. Since we don’t use a mold, every mouse looks a little bit different—they can look maybe melancholy, they can look a little bit happy. The slight imperfections are actually the beauty,” head chocolatier Michael Klug says. In New York, Casa Bosques’s Rafael Prieto painstakingly molds heirloom cacao and organic cane sugar into a chocolate domino set wrapped in gold foil. It comes with a set of playful rules: “Push gently, or with force,” reads one. “If it stops midway, eat the fallen pieces. If it succeeds, eat them all.”
