The True History of Chocolate

Sophie D. Coe, Michael D. Coe

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780500770924
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is the definitive, illustrated guide to Chocolate. Beginning 3,000 years ago in the Mexican jungles, it goes on to investigate archaeology, history, botany and socio-economics, and follows the story from the Aztecs up to todays mass-produced chocolate and its luxury versions. A treat, not just for chocoholics but for anyone who enjoys lively, thorough historical research. Sophie D. Coe, anthropologist and food historian, was also the author of 'Americas First Cuisines'.

CHAPTER ONE

The Tree of the Food of the Gods

This history begins with a tree, a spindly understory tree, content to grow in the shade of buttress-rooted giants. How the seeds of this tree acquired immense importance socially, religiously, medically, economically, and of course gastronomically, on both sides of the Atlantic will be the substance of the story. In the New World that gave it birth, this seed was so valuable as a foodstuff, as currency, and as a religious symbol that the literature about it is unrivalled in quantity and diversity by writings about any other American plant which made the journey to the Old World.

Our story opens in Mexico and Central America, thousands of years before the Spanish Conquest. The narrative is based on European sources, especially for the later European use of the seed; but the less well-known yet equally extensive documentation from the New World should provide a counterbalance.

The European invaders had to name the plants, all new to them, that they had “discovered,” and then struggle to fit them into schemes of classification and into the health theory of the time, all laid down by long-dead Classical authors who had been totally unaware of the New World’s existence. In their turn, the native peoples of the new lands had to cope with the renaming and re-interpretation of their familiar staples, acquaintances of millennial standing, under duress from the Europeans.

The face-off between the two worlds is nicely illustrated by the scientific name of our tree: Theobroma cacao, given to it in 1753 by Carl von Linné, the 18th-century Swedish scientist whose cognomen is usually written in its Latinized form as Linnaeus. The binomial system by which we now classify all living things was invented by him, to replace the clumsy descriptive Latin sentences used by his predecessors. The first part of this particular binomial, the name of the genus to which cacao (the “chocolate tree”) belongs, is from the Greek and means “food of the gods.” It is not clear exactly whose gods Linnaeus had in mind, although he himself is known to have been fond of chocolate. The New World name cacao—which, as we shall see, provides a clue for the unravelling of chocolate’s earliest history—he found barbaric, and thus put it in second place as the specific name.

The binomial that Linnaeus bestowed on our tree, expressive as it is of the complexities of the encounter between the Old World and the New, has not been changed in the two and a half centuries since it was first imposed; but formal, scientific binomials are rarely used in everyday discourse. It has become a convention in American English, although one that is not consistently observed, that the plant and all its products before processing are referred to as “cacao.” After processing, the seeds, whether in liquid or solid form, become “chocolate.” “Cocoa,” which in British English is often used to refer to what Americans call “cacao” and “chocolate,” in American English refers only to the defatted powder invented by the Dutchman Coenraad Van Houten in 1828; it will be so used in this book. But just to confuse matters, the New York Commodities Market calls the unprocessed seeds “cocoa”!

Simple, reduplicated syllables are frequent among common names for plants, and have led the unwary to find cacao where it did not and does not exist. We must be careful not to confuse Theobroma cacao with the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, and its products, often known as “coco” in tropical America. If we succeed in avoiding this obstacle, there is another—also a New World plant and also sometimes used to produce a drink—to stumble over. This is the coca bush, Erythroxylum coca, the leaves of which were chewed by the Incas of Peru and their predecessors. Many a reader has come across the word “coca” in accounts of Peru, and has been deceived by it into enrolling the Incas into the ranks of pre-Columbian chocolate drinkers. Today a refreshing tea made from the leaves is administered to tourists suffering from altitude sickness in the Andean highlands; but an infinitely greater quantity of the coca leaf goes to the illicit industry that makes cocaine for the international market. Even this does not exhaust the list of soundalikes. A starchy root eaten in the Caribbean is colloquially called “coco”; scientifically, it is one of the species of the genus Colocasia. There are other plants with similar common names, such as the “coco-bean” (a variety of the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris), but enough has been said to make clear that a reference to “cocoa,” or something that sounds vaguely similar, is not necessarily proof of the presence of Theobroma cacao.

The great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus (1707–78) gave the scientific name Theobroma cacao to the chocolate tree. (After a painting by Hoffman, courtesy of the Linnaean Society.)

For a tree that bears seeds of such importance, cacao is singularly difficult to grow.¹ With very few exceptions, it refuses to bear fruit outside a band of 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south of the Equator. Nor is it happy within this band of the tropics if the altitude is so high as to result in temperatures that fall below 60°F or 16°C. If the climate is one with a pronounced dry season, irrigation is a necessity, for cacao demands year-round moisture; if it does not get it, it sheds its otherwise evergreen leaves in a protest that is described as looking like autumn in New England. Poor growing conditions make it even more susceptible than it normally is to the multitude of diseases which attack it, including pod rots, wilts, and fungus-produced, extraneous growths called “witches’ brooms.” Squirrels, monkeys, and rats steal the pods to enjoy the pleasant-tasting white pulp which envelops the seeds that they contain, but they avoid the bitter-tasting seeds themselves (although they may disseminate them).

When these seeds are planted in soil that suits their requirements, they sprout within a few days; the young trees will bear fruit by their third or fourth year. However, most propagation in today’s cacao plantations is carried out by means of cuttings or the transplantation of carefully raised seedlings. The maximum length of time that a seed can retain its viability, its capacity to sprout, is three months—and that assumes the use of the most modern technology available. Exposure to low temperature or low humidity kills the seed. These details of the seed’s inner workings bear directly on theories of the origin and pre-Columbian migration of the cacao plant, and should be enough to convince anyone that protracted journeys in the distant past were out of the question.

Sixteenth-century European writers, eager to make this tree accessible to their Old World readers (an eagerness that was doubled by the fact that among the Aztecs cacao beans were used as money as well as foodstuffs), said that it was about the size of a heart cherry tree or an orange tree, with leaves that were similar to those of the latter, but a bit broader and longer. The manner of the tree’s flowering, however, was not at all familiar. Unlike European fruit trees, it did not flower from spurs along the branches, or from the branch tips. The cacao tree, in a fashion favored by other tropical fruit trees, flowers from small cushions on its trunk and on the larger branches, a pattern technically known as “cauliflory.” It is amusing to see European illustrators vainly trying to cope with this alien (to them) way of flowering: those who never saw the actual tree usually moved the cacao pods out to the smaller branches, obviously thinking that the native watercolorists whose work they were engraving had been mistaken in their observations.

Cacao tree, from the 16th-century herbal of Francisco Hernández, royal physician to Philip II of Spain. (From F. Hernández, Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus, Madrid, 1649.)

Cauliflory is clearly a response to the ecological niche in which the cacao plant flourishes: the damp, shaded understory. The small, five-petaled flowers are pollinated exclusively by midges, which thrive in this environment. Ever since cacao was first domesticated, growers have maintained this shade by interplanting taller trees of other species in their plantations, in the belief that the young cacao trees need protection from the sun. Yet these same growers are puzzled by the fact that even in (or especially in) the most modern plantations, among the many hundreds of flowers produced by a single cacao tree annually, only 1 to 3 percent actually bear fruit. This is biological inefficiency taken to an extreme. Experiments and observation carried out in Costa Rica by the American entomologist Allen Young² have shown wherein the real problem lies. Under the somewhat aseptic regimen prevalent in large-scale plantations, midges do poorly. In the usually well-tended groves, the litter and mess natural to the rainforest floor—leaf trash, dead animals, and rotten cacao pods—are absent. Yet this produces the perfect, moist, untidy environment which is the ideal breeding ground for the pollinating midges. Unbeknownst to the commercial planters, the trees which they have planted to shade the cacao are not there to protect T. cacao from the sun, but to maintain midge populations, if only poorly. Pre-Columbian peoples probably had a higher rate of return, since they harvested cacao in modest, garden-style plantings near forest streams, not in huge, neatly manicured plantations.

Once pollinated, each flower results in a large pod containing 30 to 40 almond-shaped seeds or “beans” surrounded by sweet, juicy pulp. The plant itself has no mechanism by which the pods can open and the seeds disperse; this must be done by humans in stands of domesticated cacao, or by monkeys or squirrels in stands of wild or feral cacao. These animals cannot be seeking the beans, which are made bitter by alkaloids, but the delicious pulp, which is probably what attracted humans to T. cacao in the first place.

The pods take some four to five months to reach full size, and then another month to ripen completely. Even though flowers are fertilized and pods ripen throughout the year, there are usually two major harvests, as the pods will keep on the trunk of the tree for several weeks, and as harvested pods for another week. However, modern techniques now allow for continuous harvests. Harvesting must be done with care, so as not to damage the cushions, which continually produce flowers, and therefore fruit.

A cacao tree in Comalcalco, Tabasco, Mexico. The pods grow directly from the trunk. (Photo courtesy Nicholas Hellmuth, FLAAR, www.maya-archaeology.org)

Once the pods are opened, and the beans and their surrounding pulp extracted, there are four principal steps which must be taken to produce the cacao “nibs” (kernels) which are to be ground into chocolate.³ These are: (1) fermentation, (2) drying, (3) roasting (or toasting), and (4) winnowing. No matter what the level of technology, this sequence has been in force for at least four millennia, and still is followed in the modern world.

The length of the fermentation undergone by seeds and pulp varies somewhat: beans of the criollo variety used to be given one to three days, and forastero beans three to five, but now both seem to get five to six days. During the first day, various chemical and biological processes occur; the adhering pulp becomes liquid, and drains away as the temperature rises steadily. But most importantly, the seeds briefly germinate, soon to be killed by high temperatures and increased acidity; this has to take place, as ungerminated beans do not give a chocolate flavor to the finished product. By the third day, the mass of beans, which must be turned from time to time, stays between 45°C (113°F) and 50°C (122°F); it must remain at this higher temperature for several days after germination, or again the “chocolate” will not taste like chocolate. The fermentation process lowers the astringency of the beans, which is probably what made them unattractive to marauding animals.

Fermentation completed, the beans are dried, traditionally on mats or trays left in the sun; this takes one to two weeks, depending on the weather. During the drying process, the beans lose more than half their weight, although the enzymatic action initiated by the fermentation goes on. Roasting, which lasts from 70 to 115 minutes, involves temperatures of 99°–104°C (210°–219°F) for chocolate and 116°–121°C (240°–250°F) for cocoa powder, and is absolutely necessary for the development of flavor and aroma; through this step, owing to chemical changes and further loss of moisture, the nib becomes a richer brown in color, more friable, and even less astringent.

Workers on a cacao plantation extracting the pulp-surrounded seeds from the pods in preparation for fermentation. (Courtesy Société des Produits Nestlé S.A., Vevey, Switzerland.)

The final step is winnowing, in which the thin and useless shell is peeled off or otherwise removed. The resulting nibs can then be ground into something we would recognize as the subject of this book; this substance is known in the trade as “cacao liquor.” Cacao, like any other long-cultivated plant, has many varieties, and their distribution, as well as that of the wild plant (if it still exists), affords us insights into the origin of the plant, its domestication, and its subsequent relationship with human beings.

In his 1964 revision of the genus Theobroma, the botanist José Cuatrecasas⁴ defines 22 species, grouped into six sections. He suggests that the genus (but not specifically Theobroma cacao) evolved on the eastern slopes of the South American Andes, long before human beings ventured into the New World from Siberia. Only two of the 22 are of any interest to us: T. cacao and T. bicolor. The other 20 grow in the Amazon basin; along the Pacific coast from Ecuador north to Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico; and on the northern, that is to say Caribbean, coast of South America.

The less well-known cultivated species, Theobroma bicolor, while not a source of cacao, is grown as a kitchen garden crop from southern Mexico south to tropical Bolivia and Brazil. In Mexi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Other Titles of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Tree of the Food of the Gods
• Chapter Two: The Birth of Chocolate: Mesoamerican Genesis
• Chapter Three: The Aztecs: People of the Fifth Sun
• Colour Plates I
• Chapter Four: Encounter and Transformation
• Chapter Five: Chocolate Conquers Europe
• Chapter Six: The Source
• Chapter Seven: Chocolate in the Age of Reason (and Unreason)
• Colour Plates II
• Chapter Eight: Chocolate for the Masses
• Chapter Nine: The Ethics of Chocolate
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright