Chocolate: From the Food of the Gods to the Candy Aisle

MesoAmerica and ChocolateIn our series looking at foods that built civilizations, today we are going to stay in the Americas with chocolate.

Chocolate has been used as currency, consumed by kings, incorporated into religious ceremonies, and prescribed as medicine. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry that wants you to believe that eating chocolate is an act of preventive cardiology.

I mean, why not? They convinced us to give chocolate to people we love, eat it when we are happy, when we are sad, when only the dog understands us. Don’t feed chocolate to your dog.

And we have done all this with a bitter seed that most of us would probably spit out if we tasted it straight from the tree.

Ancient Harvest and Production of CacaoArchaeological evidence from Ecuador indicates people used cacao about 5,300 years ago.

Football-shaped pods were cut from large branches of the Theobroma cacao tree. The pods are sliced open and have 30 to 40 seeds encased in a sweet, sticky white pulp. The seeds and pulp were scooped out and placed into piles or baskets covered in banana leaves to ferment for 3 to 7 days. During fermentation, yeasts broke down the pulp, killed the seed germ, and began developing the chocolate flavor.

After fermentation, the beans were spread on mats and left in the sun for about a week. Workers periodically turned them until they were dry and brown. At this point, the beans were shelf-stable, light, and portable. They were bagged and used as currency across Mesoamerica. Imagine growing your currency.

To make the cacao drink, the beans were toasted on a griddle over an open fire, which loosened the papery outer husks. They then crushed the shells and blew away the husk, revealing the inner cacao nibs.

These were then ground, like maize, by rubbing a stone rolling pin back and forth over the nibs. The friction and a small controlled fire under the stone would melt the natural cacao butter. As a result, the solid nibs transformed into a rich, glossy, flowing chocolate paste.

They mixed this pure cacao paste with water, cornmeal (to thicken it), spicy chili peppers, wild vanilla, allspice, and fragrant flowers.

To serve it, they would pour the liquid from jars into bowls until a thick froth formed on top. That was considered the most prized part of the sacred drink.

The Maya used cacao in ceremonies, the Aztecs collected cacao as tribute, and the beans were used as currency. Just like we used to use the Hershey’s bar as currency on the playground.