History of Chocolate in the New World
While we tend to think of chocolate as a traditionally European confectionary. However, chocolate's history actually goes back to Latin America where the cacao tree resides. The beans inside the plant are what create chocolate.
It can be traced back to 1500 BCE, in the Olmec civilization. It was typically used as a drink, not quite yet a solid food. Chocolate was reserved for adult males and consumed by priests, government officials, military officers. Thus only men were really allowed to drink chocolate because it was considered intoxicating, and unsuitable for women or children.
In Aztec culture, chocolate was used with chilli peppers, and vanilla for flavors, bee honey for sweetner. When the Spanish settlers arrived, they adapted Aztec chocolate for their own pallets. Cortes took it back to the Spanish court, where it was only ingested by Spanish royalty. The Spanish added a tool called the "molinillo", a wood stirring stick to smooth it out. Indigenous peoples were taken as slaves in the colonies ito harvest and process the chocolate and sugar. They did so for two hundred years.
It wasn't until the 1600s that the rest of Europe was introduced to chocolate, and they went crazy for it. The Dutch, English, and French sought out colonies that could produce cacao trees. As Europeans became more familiar with chocolate, they removed the chili pepper,
added flavors such as anise, cinnamon, nutmeg, and orange peel, and replaced the bee honey with cane sugar. By the late 18th century,
Europeans had the production of chocolate down.
For more information:
History.org
Archive.FieldMuseum.org
Written by Jessica Shakarian
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