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Demonstrators urge the government to protect Cadbury's UK workforce earlier this year, after news of the Kraft takeover. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
Demonstrators urge the government to protect Cadbury's UK workforce earlier this year, after news of the Kraft takeover. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury – review

This article is more than 13 years old
Rachel Cooke relishes a fascinating history of chocolate by a member of the Cadbury family… but is more concerned about the fate of her beloved Curly Wurly and Crunchie

I work at home, and when the writing is going badly, I often find myself heading out to the newsagent at the end of the street for chocolate. Mostly, I favour Curly Wurlys – so chewy, so nostalgic – though when the countdown to the weekend begins, I also like a Crunchie, the 1980s ad campaign "thank Crunchie it's Friday" having worked on me rather too well. Just lately, however, I have noticed that both these treats are rather harder to come by, especially the Curly Wurly. Is this the result of haphazard ordering on the part of my newsagent? Or does it, as I fear, have something to do with Kraft's recent takeover of Cadbury, a hostile swallowing up that resulted in the closure of the factory that makes Crunchie and Curly Wurly?

I'd hoped to find the answer to this pressing question within the pages of Deborah Cadbury's Chocolate Wars. Cadbury is a successful historian, and a relative of the family that gave its name to one of the world's best-selling brands of chocolate, and thus should be in a position to tell us whether, for instance, Cadbury will ever bring back my beloved Fry's Five Centres (Cadbury merged with its Quaker rival, JS Fry & Sons, in 1919; Five Centres, a fruity version of Fry's Chocolate Cream, ceased production in 1992). But 300 pages later, and I am still none the wiser. Cadbury is a perfectly diligent chronicler of the story of chocolate, and the 19th-century families who built their fortunes on it. She knows lots about the link between the slave trade and cocoa beans, and even more about Bournville, Cadbury's model village, with its carillon, its lido and its friends meeting house. But for someone who has devoted huge amounts of time to poking around in the Cadbury archives, she has remarkably little feeling for its products. Innovations of the 1920s such as the Flake and Creme Eggs (they came originally in fondant, marshmallow or marzipan) are mentioned only in passing and, even worse, she refers to them as "countlines" – a retail term, I discover, for items of confectionery that are sold to stores in multipacks, and then flogged on individually to customers. Where you and I see comfort and calories and sweet nostalgia, Cadbury sees only the bottom line; it's as if she has gone native.

Oh, well. There are fascinating things here; you just need to approach the book the same way you would any fancy box, and be selective. While I skim-read her account of Cadbury's merger with Schweppes, and of Kraft's subsequent takeover – metaphorically speaking, I treated these bits of the book like chocolate ginger, a confection I usually leave well alone – I relished the story of chocolate itself. For the very first solid and edible form of chocolate, the Fry family takes the credit, for it was JS Fry & Sons which, in 1847, first thought to mix its cocoa powder with its by-product, cocoa fat, plus a little sugar. Cadbury, meanwhile, was struggling to shift its much less appealing products – among them something called Iceland Moss, which was made by blending fatty chocolate beans with lichen (the resulting bar could be grated and turned into a drink that was believed to have health-improving properties).

Only when George Cadbury began to take risks did the company's fortunes change. In 1866 he bought a machine from the Dutch manufacturer Van Houten, which allowed him to refine cocoa more efficiently. The result – Cadbury's Cocoa Essence – was more expensive than that of its rivals, but it was also more pure (unscrupulous traders used to bulk out their cocoa with everything from potato flour to treacle; a few even coloured it with brick dust). Then, in 1904, he finally worked out how to make velvety milk chocolate, just like the Swiss. He called his new product Dairy Maid, changing the name to the "much daintier" Dairy Milk six weeks later on the advice of the daughter of the owner of a Plymouth confectionary shop, and it was a hit.

By 1910 Cadbury was Britain's largest manufacturer of cocoa and chocolate. The only kink in this blameless story of hard work and high ideals – there is no doubting the fact that the Quakers were dutiful and kindly domestic employers – came shortly before this, when the Standard accused the company of profiting from slavery in Africa. In the ensuing libel trial, Cadbury was the victor, but the family was awarded with only a farthing in damages. In her retelling of this unedifying saga, Deborah Cadbury is at pains to stress that it was inertia on the part of William and George Cadbury, rather than selective blindness or greed, that led to the embroiling of the company in such a hateful business; the brothers had long been horrified by rumours of slavery, but had also found themselves powerless in the face of the Foreign Office and the Portuguese. Is she right? I'm not sure. But I will say this: their subsequent mortification lies in stark contrast to the slick and guilt-free press releases of the modern corporate world. The more I read about the early Cadburys – one sister, Beatrice, was so determined not to set store by material possessions, she lived, with her eight children, in a tent – the more I liked them.

Does it matter that Kraft owns the business now? Not in principle. One multinational corporation is much like another these days, and Cadbury was a giant long before Irene Rosenfeld (Kraft's CEO) started sniffing around. But it's hard not to mourn the passing of the Quaker chocolate makers, so sombre and peaceful and compassionate; I think I would like to see their return even more than I would the colourful fondant of Fry's Five Centres.

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