The sinful story of chocolate

Chocolate, sweet chocolate. — Paila/Creative Commons

Many of you will be feasting on chocolate as Valentine suitors offer the classic gift — sweet little chocolate tidbits in a heart-shaped box.

I first received tribute of this sort as a mere child. George Blum, a kid who lived at the other end of my street, showed up one Valentine’s Day with a chocolate sampler when I was about 6 and he, perhaps, 8. I vaguely remember both of us being somewhat embarrassed about the whole thing, which struck me more as his parents’ idea than his.

How curious it is that chocolate is today considered perfectly safe for children, whom we stuff with chocolate bars, chocolate milk and chocolate breakfast cereal at every opportunity. It was not thus at the dawn of chocolate consumption, I assure you.

Return with me now to the tropical rainforests of Central America circa 1,500 B.C. The Maya and the Aztecs — and quite possibly the even older Olmec culture — had discovered that the seeds of the cacao (kah KOW) tree were the raw material of a unique taste treat.

Mind you, they had to piece together how and when to harvest the seed pods, how to ferment and dry them, how to roast the cacao beans in a griddle over the fire, and then how to grind them into a paste with a pair of stones. I put this discovery right up there with other quixotic food quests, like the one that led someone to realize sustenance could be scraped from the leathery “petals” of the artichoke. (Hungry, were they?)

The Mesoamericans didn’t eat their chocolate — they drank it. The ground cacao beans were mixed with water, chili peppers, cornmeal and spices to make a piquant, bitter drink, served cold. It was not sweetened, since sugar had not yet entered the food chain.

Chocolate, the drink, was considered a sacred brew, or at least one best suited to the ruling classes. Among the Mayans, who grew the cacao tree, imbibing was more democratic. But among the Aztecs, whose drier lands couldn’t support cacao culture, chocolate came to occupy an exalted niche. The beans were used as money and demanded in tribute.

The cacao seed pod. — Fluffymuppet/Creative Commons

The Aztec tlaquetzallis, as the beverages were known, could be tinted red, pink, orange or even blue-green, depending on additives. For the most part, only rulers, priests, heroic soldiers and wealthy merchants could partake. There was one other cocktail that the most common of commoners could enjoy — but only once.

According to Stewart Lee Allen in his book “In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food” (Ballantine Books) itzpacalatl was a special chocolate drink mixed with human blood that sacrificial victims could quaff just before the Aztec priests ripped their still-beating hearts from their chests.

Early chocolate drinkers associated their brew with both violence and lust, considering it a powerful intoxicant and aphrodisiac. Montezuma himself was said to down 50 glasses of chocolate drink a day to gird himself for the demands of his many wives.

Modern science throws a wet blanket on all this, claiming the active ingredients in chocolate occur in amounts too small to have much of an effect, but that’s not how it played when chocolate reached the Old World. Chocolate “t’will make Old Women Young and Fresh/Create new Motions of the Flesh/and cause them to long for You-Know-What,” wrote one English wag of the period.

It was the Spanish conquistadors who brought chocolate to Europe in the 1500s, fresh from their trashing of New World cultures. (If you’ve ever wondered why the chocolate variation in “The Nutcracker” is a Spanish fandango, here’s your answer.) Within 100 years, chocolate was favored in better European palaces everywhere — and denounced by the keepers of morals as a “witch’s brew.”

It was again another 100 years before chocolate came to the masses, with development in France of hydraulic and steam-driven equipment to grind those rock-hard beans. In Holland, the new cocoa press extracted liquids from the beans leaving cocoa powder, an ingredient infinitely cheaper and more versatile. Suddenly, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and a global sugar trade, chocolate was about to reach ordinary customers who were not facing death by vivisection.

Two names loom large in more modern times. In 1875, Henri Nestlé combined cocoa powder with condensed milk to create “milk chocolate.” And in 1910, William Cadbury led a coalition of English and American manufacturers in a fight to boycott cacao farms that treated their laborers like slaves long after slavery was officially abolished. Today, the brutal plantations are gone and cacao is raised worldwide by independent farmers — by hand, as it was in the beginning.

But has chocolate’s image really been rehabilitated? I can’t be sure, since virtually every chocoholic I know chooses the same word to describe the best of the best: “sinful.”

How far have we really come?