Introduction

Introduction ❧ “Oh, Pangloss!” cried Candide, “what a strange genealogy! Is not the Devil the original stock of it [syphilis]?” “Not at all,” replied this great man, “it was a thing unavoid- able, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which con- taminates the source of life, frequently even hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.” Voltaire, Candide All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction. Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin Voltaire should have known better. There is not a shred of evidence that Columbus ever contracted syphilis in the New World (though some of his crew may have), nor did he know anything about chocolate (as we shall see), let alone cochineal, a fine red dye derived from the bodies of Mexican scale insects. The reply of the ever-optimistic Pangloss to Candide’s question is just one of the countless examples of “accepted fiction” replacing fact in the history of food and cooking. Europeans did eventually learn of these two valuable substances, but this had nothing to do with the great navigator’s alleged social disease. The title of this book about chocolate is adapted from The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, penned (or dictated) by Neptune, god of the sea, receiving chocolate from a personified America; this allegorical frontispiece to the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, completed in 1572 in Cardinal Brancaccio’s 1664 treatise on chocolate illustrates its transfer from the New World to Europe. Guatemala’s capital. Old, poor, and nearly blind, this doughty 10 11 ❧ Introduction ❧ ❧ Introduction ❧ warrior merely wished to get the facts about the fall of the Aztecs by giving more attention to chocolate as a valued beverage. And straight for once. Unlike others who had written about the feats of since most books and articles on the subject devote only a few lines Cortés and his men, sometimes in sycophantic terms, Bernal Díaz or pages, at the most, to the pre-Conquest era, we have devoted had actually been there, had known all the main participants— two chapters to this area of study—after all, only about one fifth of including the Aztec emperor himself—and had no special axe to chocolate’s existence postdates the fall of the Aztec capital in 1521. grind. His only goal was to tell as true a story as possible, free from The dark brown, pleasantly bitter, chemically complex sub- what he called “lofty rhetoric.” He proved to the world that a stance we know of as chocolate bears little resemblance to the “true history” could be far more engrossing and enlightening than pulp-surrounded seeds of the cocoa plant from which it is pro- “accepted fiction.” duced. One would never suspect that the one could be derived The history of food (and drink) has only become a respect- from the other. To understand properly the origin of the cacao able scholarly subject in recent decades, at least in the Western tree (Theobroma cacao), and the steps involved in turning its seeds world. In North America and Great Britain, we have long suffered or beans into chocolate, we examine its economic botany and from puritanical prohibitions against the discussion of food while chocolate’s chemistry and properties in Chapter One; the answers at table—and elsewhere, for that matter. Although food, sex, and to the puzzle of cacao’s origin and domestication lie at hand, since mortality are the three great givens of human existence, earlier the complete DNA sequence of the plant was determined in 2010 generations of academics generally avoided these topics, consider- by two laboratories backed by the arch-rivals Mars and Hershey. ing them not quite respectable. As a consequence, culinary history The ultimate origin of processed chocolate, though, seems to was long left by default to amateur enthusiasts of one or another lie with the village farmers of southern Mexico’s Pacific coastal food, drink, or cuisine. This is especially the case with choco- plain, almost four millennia in the past, and with the Olmecs who late (and the cacao from which it is manufactured), a substance followed them, as shall be seen in Chapter Two. We then turn our whose origins lie in the difficult and sometimes cloudy area of New attention to the rulers and royal courts of the brilliant cities of World prehistory and ethnohistory. The result is that much food the Classic Maya, and present exciting new data on Maya choc- writing about chocolate’s past falls into the category of Voltaire’s olate-drinking based on the recent decipherment of hieroglyphic “accepted fiction.” We are often reminded of that parlor game texts. Chapter Three will survey the incredibly rich documentary where the players sit in a circle, each whispering a story, which evidence on the use and importance of cacao as both drink and they have heard from a neighbor on one side, to their neighbor on coinage among the Aztecs, and the ritual significance of the bev- the other; the story, of course, becomes increasingly less faithful to erage as a symbol of human blood. the original as it goes around the circle. In this book we have tried With the cataclysmic destruction of the Aztecs’ mile-high to break free of the circle by going back to the original sources. capital in 1521, and the downfall of their empire, we enter an When we modern Westerners think of chocolate, we think of era in which chocolate-taking was transformed and creolized by it in its solid, sweetened form, and this is reflected in the undue the Spanish conquerors, and even new terminology invented, emphasis which much food writing gives to solid chocolate. Yet including the very word chocolate itself. Chapters Four and Five during nine tenths of its long history, chocolate was drunk, not will show how the transformed, renamed, and taste-altered drink eaten. In our “true history,” we have tried to restore the balance was brought to Europe, where it was considered a medicine to 12 13 ❧ Introduction ❧ ❧ Introduction ❧ be taken according to the ancient Hippocratic-Galenic theory of Our history thus far will center on chocolate as a beverage of the time. It also had to fit in with rules about fasting prevalent in the elite, whether of brown-skinned Aztec nobles or pale-skinned Catholic countries. Jesuit clerics. Chapter Eight will deal with chocolate’s modern The word “baroque” has come to mean ornateness and com- history, beginning with the industrialization at the beginning of plexity employed for dramatic and artistic effects, and certainly the 19th century, and the subsequent invention of solid chocolate in Baroque Europe there was a tremendous elaboration in the for eating, not as something to be mixed with water and imbibed. preparation of drunk chocolate, and even the inclusion of choc- Chocolate soon became a snack for the masses, typified by the olate in dishes produced for noble and ecclesiastical tables. In ubiquitous chocolate bar, a transformation overseen by the great, Chapter Five, we shall see the deep involvement of the Jesuits innovating manufacturers of England, Switzerland, and other and the Catholic Church in all this, and examine daring Italian European countries. But true mass-production techniques were experiments with the substance, in a way pushing chocolate to its perfected in the United States by Milton Hershey, with his own culinary limits. factory town and Disney-like theme park based on chocolate. Yet In Chapter Six we shall tell of the producers who were respon- as production, mass-marketing, and consumption skyrocketed, sible for the cacao and chocolate that reached the palaces, noble the culinary quality of the product plummeted. courts, and chocolate houses of Europe. This part of our history In Chapter 9 we shall consider the sometimes worrying ethical concerns colonialism, the transport and exploitation of black concerns of the chocolate industry. Nevertheless, we end our slave labor, and Spanish state monopolies, as well as the gradual “true history” on an optimistic note: the debasement of chocolate slipping away of Spanish power as England, Holland, and France has led to its own reaction, with the emergence in the late 20th gained control of the seas. Eventually, major cacao production was and early 21st centuries of elite, premier chocolate for connois- transferred from Spain’s tropical American possessions to Africa seurs with long pockets—but to be eaten, of course, not sipped, as and beyond, to colonies controlled by Spain’s deadly rivals. chocolate had been for most of the thousands of years since that Following the culinary excesses of the Baroque Age, chocolate unknown Mexican Indian first turned cocoa beans into “the food preparation during Europe’s Age of Reason seems almost tame, of the gods.” but chocolate-drinking continued to be associated with aris- tocracy, royalty, and the Church—except in England and other Protestant countries, where chocolate (and coffee) houses sprang up as meeting places and eventually clubs for nascent political parties. We shall see in Chapter Seven that when the Revolution brought down the Catholic and royal establishment in France, coffee and tea—the favored hot drinks of the philosophes and salons of the Enlightenment—replaced drunk chocolate. Yet the Age of Reason ends with the strange and unreasonable figure of the marquis de Sade, a staunch “chocoholic” in spite of his wildly anti-establishment prose and actions. Hershey’s Kisses, one of the most popular chocolate confections of all time. 14 15 C HAPTER 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.

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