WE used to think that chocolate, quite apart from being sinfully moreish, was actually good for you.

"It was seen as something that would keep you going," says York Museums Trust's Dr M Faye Prior. Which is not really surprising when you think about it. "It does give you a boost of energy," Faye says.

This conviction that chocolate had a medicinal quality, however, led in the late 1800s to a rash of chocolate products aimed at invalids, or those who needed lots of energy.

Products such as Oxcholate, launched by Rowntrees in the late 1890s. Oxcholate was a 'nourishing confection - pleasant, palatable and sustaining, composed of the finest chocolate with meat extract in a very concentrated form,' the wrapper boasted. 'Specially suitable for travellers, cyclists and invalids.' The Rowntree answer to the Kendal Mint Cake, perhaps?

York Press:

An Oxcholate wrapper

The 'meat extract in a very concentrated form' was probably Bovril, which had been developed in the 1870s. And no doubt it was nutritious. But if you think the combination of chocolate and meat extract sounds a bit icky, you're not alone. Oxcholate seems to have been withdrawn from sale a few weeks after being launched on an unsuspecting world, having failed to inspire its target audience. Thank goodness for small mercies.

The chocolate business, of course, has always been about experimentation - about finding that elusive new recipe that will catch on. And for every chocolate orange, there's a chocolate apple.

The chocolate apple actually came first, launched in 1926. It wasn't actually apple flavoured, says Faye. It just tasted of chocolate. But it was something new. It was designed for sharing around the table after dinner. "Everybody could have a slice." When the orange-flavoured chocolate orange arrived in 1931, however, it quickly eclipsed the chocolate apple - which today is just a footnote in history.

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The chocolate apple

And an exhibit in the York Castle Museum's forthcoming new exhibition, York's Sweet Past. Officially opening on Saturday - conveniently in time for Easter - the exhibition promises to let you 'delve into the delicious history of some of the world's most iconic chocolates and sweets'.

Alert readers will perhaps point out that York has just launched one major new chocolate exhibition - 250 Years of Terry's, which opened at York's Chocolate Story until December 31.

That, as the title implies, focusses mainly on Terry's. The York Castle Museum's new exhibition is much more wide-ranging in scope, covering not only the history of York's three main chocolate companies - Terry's, Rowntree's and Craven's - but also the way in which generations of York people have attempted to satisfy their sweet tooth.

The museum has a great collection of sweet and chocolate-related items - everything from advertising and packaging from the early days of chocolate-making in York to sweet-making moulds and tools and even a tin of cocoa which accompanied the explorer Shackleton on an expedition to the Antarctic in the early 1900s.

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An early box of 'Kit-Cat'

The new exhibition has brought many of these objects out of storage, and has cleverly integrated them into the existing displays and exhibitions at the Castle Museum to create a York's Sweet Past trail - which will be marked out by prominently-displayed sugar mice and chocolate mice symbols - that you can follow as you walk around.

Much of it is already in place, even though the exhibition doesn't officially launch until Saturday. It's an exhibition that takes time to put together, admits Faye, the museum's collection's facilitator. That's hardly surprising, given that it includes a completely new Victorian sweet shop in Kirkgate, another new Sixties sweetshop in the swinging Sixties part of the museum, plus chocolatey additions to the museum's various period rooms.

The exhibition begins with a huge display cabinet featuring some of the museum's vintage chocolate wrappers and chocolate boxes. Many of the chocolate boxes from the early 1900s were enormously plush affairs - giving one of these would have been a real statement, says assistant curator Katie Brown. And very often, the recipient would have kept the presentation box long after the chocolates themselves had been consumed, as a treasured keepsake.

York Press:

An early box of After Eight

If that makes it seem as though chocolate, at the start of the 1900s, was something that only the well-off could really afford - well, that's absolutely right. It wasn't until post-Second World War rationing ended in 1953 that ordinary people really began to be able to afford chocolate on a regular basis, Katie says.

One thing you quickly learn as you follow the York's Sweet Past trail from period room to period room is that the farther back in time you go, the more expensive and exclusive sugar and chocolate were.

As early as the Middle Ages, English people were eating sugar imported from India. But the price was astronomical. "It was only for the super-rich," says Faye.

Chocolate itself had put in an appearance by the 1660s. It would have been for drinking only, and it was gritty and oily, Faye says. But it too was very much a luxury item even so. A pound of chocolate by weight back then would have cost between 10 and 30 shillings - the equivalent of £300-£1,000 today.

York Press:

M Fay Prior browses in GE Barton's in Kirkgate

By Georgian times, chocolate and sugar were still luxury items. The Georgian room at the museum has been fitted out with everything that was necessary for the wealthy Georgian to enjoy a cup of hot chocolate. There's a cone of hard white sugar; a pair of sugar nippers to break off just the right amount to sweeten your chocolate; a nutmeg grinder to prepare fresh nutmeg to be added to your drink.

By the 1870s, things have moved on. The first bar of eating chocolate had been produced in 1847 - by Frys, sadly, not one of the York chocolate companies. But the boxes of chocolates so beloved of us today had still to appear. It was only from the 1900s onwards that they suddenly began to be popular.

The part of the new exhibition that is likely to prove most popular is the new Victorian sweet shop in Kirkgate. It has been named GE Barton after a real Victorian confectioner and baker.

He actually had eight shops around York - and the GE Barton's in Kirkgate tries to capture the flavour of what they would have been like. There's a whole range of tempting sweets and confectioneries of the kind that would have been available to the discerning sweet-toothed Victorian. And best of all, you can actually buy some of them across the counter.

York Press:

Customers James Wright and Lucy Knock in GE Barton's

If you want to see how they were made, meanwhile, just head to the museum's kitchen - which has been turned into a chocolate factory for the duration of the exhibition, complete with sweet-making experiments and demonstrations.

Just what the dentist didn't order...

  • York's Sweet Past officially opens at the York Castle Museum on Saturday April 1 - although many of the exhibits, including the new Kirkgate sweet shop, are already in place. Entry free to YMT card holders. Usual admission prices for everyone else.