Chocolate by Sarah Moss (ebook voice reader .TXT) 📕

use nuts as money or value them as if they were eyes anticipate Captain Cook’s account of Tahitian excitement over red feathers, or early European accounts of the Native American use of beads. Cacao here is merely a strange plant apparently inscribed with excessive value by people who have not yet encountered the real thing, money. This is a rare glimpse of chocolate beforeEuropeans begin to develop a mythology for it. On this day Guanaja, also known variously at this date as Bonaca and the Island of Pines (Columbus’s name for it), began its journey from habitat to source of a luxury comestible. Columbus turned round in search of gold, leaving those who travelled in his wake to discover what those beans were for.

Theobroma cacao. This nineteenth-century illustration shows the interior of the pod with its sweet pulp and cacao nibs. Note that the fruit grows directly from the trunk of the tree. From Mathematische und Naturwissenschaften, by Johann Georg Heck, 1860

It is no coincidence that the ‘most powerful’ of the luxury French chocolate manufacturer Valrhona’s Grand Cru chocolates, characterized by ‘an exceptional bitterness’, is called Guanaja. Valrhona state, ambiguously, that Guanaja was ‘the first to delight lovers of bitter dark chocolate’, leaving us to guess whether this refers to early consumers of the Valrhona bar or those first European visitors to the island. In the pile-up of adjectives that typifies descriptions of fine chocolate in the twenty-first century, Guanaja’s ‘intense taste brought out by hints of flowers reveals intensity – exceptionally long on the palate.’ The consequences of a fleeting encounter on Guanaja that day might well leave a bitter taste.

There were only two years between the first Spanish encounter with the Aztecs in 1519 and the sacking of Tenochtitlan, so what we know about the Aztecs is to a large but indeterminable extent what we know about the Conquistadors. The civilization, including its libraries, was systematically destroyed before any real understanding could have been achieved. But the evidence suggests that great wealth was partnered with sumptuary laws, familiar to medieval Europe, which placed stringent restrictions on luxury even for the upper echelons of a highly stratified society, and that the conspicuous consumption of the court of Moctezuma 11 (r. 1502–20) was balanced by the ascetic lives of the middle classes. As this suggests, the earliest observers report an ethic of austerity in Aztec society that has been erased from later accounts of debauchery and bloodletting. Chocolate was reserved for those who made the greatest sacrifices to the state, and even then was taken in small quantities at the end of a banquet.

There is relatively little evidence for the association between chocolate and blood. A passage in the Franciscanethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún’s account of Aztec religious ritual, quoted in most histories, suggests that a drink made from cacao and blood-stained water was given to sustain the spirits of sacrificial victims through their final dance, and there was some literary connection between the cocoa bean (which is indeed heart-shaped) and the human heart. One of the traditional ingredients of the chocolate drink, annatto, is also a red food colouring derived from the seeds of the achiote shrub, but it was the Spanish historian and writer Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478– 1557) who made the connection between the stained lips of those who had partaken and fresh blood. Again, it is impossible to separate the tensions surrounding first encounters from the cultural peculiarities of cacao in Aztec society, but some of our own ideas about chocolate’s powers and significance are clearly rooted in these earliest anxieties of empire.

Aztec polychrome ‘waisted’ cylindrical vase with ‘Palace Scene’.

Aztec vessel, used to hold cocoa, in the shape of a hare.

Chocolate After Conquest

Historians debate whether new materials from the New World changed European consumers, or whether European consumers assimilated new things as they assimilated alien cultures; how far, in other words, objects retain their foreign identity in the context of colonialism. It is a debate illuminated by the trajectory of chocolate from Aztec luxury tonorthern European staple, but in the first decades of this journey it seems that early modern Catholic Europe and declining native Mesoamerican cultures shared ideas about the risks and appropriate use of ‘rare victuals’.

Native American Indians roasting and grinding the beans, and mixing the chocolate in a jug with a whisk, from John Ogilvy’s America, 1671.

The first records of European responses to chocolate are predictably mixed. The Italian historian Girolamo Benzoni, who came across chocolate in Nicaragua in the mid-sixteenth century, thought that ‘it seemed more a drink for pigs, than a drink for humanity. I was in this country more than one year, and never wanted to taste it.’ Forty years later, the Spanish Jesuit missionary and naturalist José de Acosta wrote that chocolate ‘disgusts those who are not used to it, for it has a foam on top, or a scum-like bubbling ... And the Spanish men – and even more the Spanish women – are addicted to it.’ Already, then, there is a distinction in taste between ‘proper’ Spanish Spaniards and the Creoles, who, while of Spanish birth or extraction, had spent all or most of theirlives in South America. Chocolate disgusted the real Europeans, but acculturated men – and especially women – were so far gone as to become ‘addicted’ to this revolting drink. We might read this as an early account of the ‘chocoholic’ propensities of women, but alternatively it points to the European fear of ‘going native’, losing the cultural identity that had brought them to power in the first place, in the outposts of empire. It is the idea of chocolate that is addictive, a potion cooked up by exotic women in the New World.

The association of chocolate with women is enduring. As we have seen, across Mesoamerica chocolate was usually prepared by women, although often consumed by men, and recent work has concluded that, like the British Victorian taste for ‘curry’, the Spanish