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All About Cacao - History
Nearly everyone has eaten a candy bar at some point in their life. But do you really know where chocolate comes from? What plant it's derived from? Who "invented" chocolate?
Olmecs - the First Chocoholics
Pochtecas Take to the Trail
Mayan Might and Aztec Addiction
The Cortez Conquest and the European Elite
A Oaxacan Nunnery Makes Its Mark
Chocolate Becomes a Food
The plant is one of the oldest cultivars from the American tropics and at the time their discovery, it had been cultivated by the Aztecs for several centuries. They believed cacao to have originated from a divine source and legend states that the good and wise god Tula Quetzalcoatl brought with him its seeds that he cultivated his garden, thus bringing the tree to earth.
The Aztecs revered the tree and consumed its beans in the form of a drink called chocolatl. To make this concoction, the beans were roasted and then ground with maize, annatto, chili and other spices to form the thick drink. It gained its name from the sound it made when being whisked 'choco' and the water 'atl' with which it was mixed. It was a crude bitter drink and the Spaniards described it as being 'fitter for hogs than of men'.
The Spanish mixed this drink with sugar and cinnamon, and in the sixteenth century the royal court in Spain was introduced to cocoa for the first time. The drinking of chocolate then spread to France and England in the seventeenth century (arriving before coffee or tea) where it became a fashionable drink. Europe soon became enamored on this decadent drink and its popularity became widespread. Chocolate houses in which you could consume chocolate drinks were popular frequents of the wealthy aristocracy. Switzerland was the first country to mix milk solids with the cocoa and sugar in 1876, where it held a monopoly on the process until Cadbury developed its chocolate in 1904.
The cultivation of T. cacao soon spread throughout the world. As the demand for cocoa increased in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cacao became a pan-tropical crop. Firstly, cacao spread to Trinidad and other islands in the Caribbean from where it was taken further to the Philippines and |
Epic of the Cacao Bean 
