Xocolatl: The Evolution of Chocolate

Modern associations with chocolate are usually with joy, with celebrations (or with bad break-ups). Chocolate has been known to Westerners for only 500 years, but it’s hard to imagine a world without it. It’s also hard to imagine the stuff being prepared in any other way.

Chocolate’s origins were quite different from the stuff we know today. Starting with the cacao bean, the other base ingredient the Aztecs used was ground-up maize. The word chocolate comes from the Aztec word xocolatl (/ʃo ko ˌlat əl/, or /sho-ko-LOT-ul/), meaning “bitter water”, since it was usually served in a liquefied form. And bitter it was: the Aztecs seldom sweetened it. Sometimes it was prepared with honey, but that was only one of the many recipes. Others included vanilla, or chilis, or any number of spices.

Xocolatl was a luxury in ancient Mesoamerica. Cacao beans were very valuable, and said to be a gift from the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl. You could trade about 80 of them for a canoe, and you had to watch out for counterfeiters, who would sometimes pass off empty cacao shells filled with mud as the real thing. Xocolatl was considered a powerful intoxicant, and was consumed in serious ceremonies.

Christopher Columbus was the first European to encounter cacao beans, which he described in his fourth trip to the Americas in 1502 as “almonds”. Spanish soldiers and colonists were aware of the beans and how the Aztecs (and Incas) felt about them, but chocolate itself didn’t make its way to Europe until after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, late in the 16th century. When it started to appear in the Spanish courts, the custom was to sometimes add honey, as the Aztecs sometimes did, or more commonly to add sugar. The bitter version of chocolate was never very popular in Europe.

Since most of the Mesoamerican population had been decimated by disease, African slaves were brought in to work the cacao plantations of Central America. Cacao beans were also planted in Africa and Asia, which also had favorable climates for the beans’ cultivation. The work of cultivating and processing the beans was tedious, but it sped up with processes invented by the Dutch during the Industrial Revolution. A new form of chocolate, lower in fat and less bitter, was released to the world in the early 19th century. This opened up a new era of chocolate. Recipes were developed over the next century by people who would become household names: Lindt, Nestlé, Cadbury, and Hershey, among others.

Today, most of the world’s cacao beans are grown in Africa, with the vast majority of them grown in Ivory Coast. Cacao beans are subject to price fluctuations on the world market. While commodity traders can buy and sell the beans when the price changes rapidly, cacao farmers don’t have that option, and often turn to slave labor in order to remain in business. 80 beans won’t get you as far today as they used to.

The god Quetzalcoatl

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon? Silly question, isn’t it? You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right? That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy. Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow. You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true. The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma. (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar . I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.) The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years. The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits. One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”. It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice. Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes. I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult? Yes… and no. The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult. It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser . Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word. One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game would have to hose down the rink in or

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats? If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.” Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right. Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s. In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats? The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style. Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice. But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too. When that happened, you’d just throw it away. Though if there were

Search This Blog