By Joel Denker
How many of us have seen the tropical cacao tree? Even a photo of it? The image is arresting. How many of us associate chocolate sweets with an evergreen whose melon-shaped pods, orange or red, do not hang from stems but jut out directly from its trunk and branches? These striking fruits spring up after the cacao’s white and pink flowers have bloomed.
The cacao’s seeds, purplish beans that are buried in the pulp of the pod, aroused the curiosity of explorers. Columbus’s son, Ferdinand, on a ship in the Gulf of Honduras in 1502, spotted a dugout canoe, most likely Mayan, whose passengers were carrying a load of peculiarly shaped beans: “They seemed to hold these almonds at a great price; for when they were brought on board ship together with their goods, I observed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped to pick it up as if an eye had fallen.” Ferdinand did not know that the almond-shaped objects were, in fact, cacao beans.
They were also of great fascination to the natives of the Americas. Indians developed a taste for the bitter, acrid beans. From these seeds, they conjured up an invigorating, even intoxicating, but definitely not sweet drink. The Aztecs named the tree cacao and the refreshment cacoatl (atl means water). Much later, the botanist Carl Linnaeus classified the plant evocatively. He called it Theobroma (“Food of the Gods”) Cacao.
In the beginning, chocolate had a mystique about it. A mysterious stimulant, its pleasures were the prerogative of the elite. The cacao beans in this ceremonial beverage would one day be transmuted into a commonplace candy.
The Aztecs, the wandering tribe who built their empire in Mexico’s dry highlands, wove cacao into their culture’s aristocratic fabric. They acquired the beans from the Maya, who lived in a steamy, low lying terrain that was friendlier to the tree. Indians domesticated the rain forest tree and cultivated it in small gardens or groves.
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To learn more about chocolate, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
