Chocolate Cacao Nibs

History

From Susan's Award-Winning Book Sweet as Sin

Not much is known about the Olmecs aside from sculptures of immense stone gods,
with broad, well-defined noses, full lips, enormous focused eyes — and their
early use of chocolate and cacao beans.

Among the first civilizations in Mesoamerican history to prepare a chocolate drink, they transformed cacao into a prized food by removing the cocoa beans from the pod and fermenting them for two to eight days.

Next, they dried, roasted, and cracked the cacao beans to release the inner cacao nibs from the shell, then ground the nibs on a hot
stone metate, adding spices such as allspice, chili, and the delectable orchid vanilla. Last, they created a rich chocolate paste which they cooled and formed into hard cakes used for drinking chocolate and ceremonial foods.

Later, the Maya cultivated the cacao tree throughout the region now known as Guatemala. The Maya held cacao and chocolate in great esteem. In death, aristocrats were buried with quantities of cacao for the afterlife; while living, a spicy, frothy cacao drink was among their greatest culinary pleasures.

As for the poor, they ate a porridge-like blend of ground cacao, maize, and spices such as chili pepper, vanilla, and dried flowers. Chocolate was not merely food to the Maya — it was medicine, ritual, currency, and sacred
nourishment.

This delicacy was said to have been brought to them by the sun god Hunahpú. Charming
as this might seem, the patron of cacao was Ek Chuah, the black-eyed war god with a hanging lower lip and scorpion tail who carried off the souls of warriors killed in battle.

In his honor, the Maya held a festival each April
where they made offerings of cacao beans, feathers, and incense, exchanged gifts, and sacrificed animals, including a dog with cacao-colored markings. Reflecting the true spirit of the event, one 8th-century Mayan chocolate-making vase was decorated with two masked figures beheading a victim while a woman
prepared a frothy cacao drink nearby.

 Later, the Aztecs engaged cacao in another form of sacrifice. The Aztecs were deeply
superstitious and lived in fear that the wrath of their many gods might cause their universe to collapse. To placate them, they sacrificed a human every day.

This unfortunate victim was usually a prisoner of war, chosen as perfect a specimen of human fitness as possible since he represented the Aztec gods on earth. They
treated the prisoner with reverence until the climax of the sacrificial ritual, where they cut his heart from his body while he was still alive.

The prisoner was expected to accept this fate bravely and, remarkably, with joy. If he
showed fear or horror, he was given a concoction made from chocolate, cacao,
blood, and other bewitching ingredients intended to transform him into a
willing participant.

Remarkably, the cacao-loving Aztecs lived in a dry region where cacao trees could not grow.
Instead, they obtained cacao beans through trade or tribute — a type of tax paid in cacao bean currency by conquered provinces. For the Aztecs, cacao beans were literally money, perhaps inspiring the expression “money doesn’t grow on trees.” A large tomato was worth one cacao bean; a turkey egg, three beans; a rabbit, one hundred beans; a slave, one thousand beans; and a prostitute, a
paltry eight.

Cacao was believed to have been made possible by Quetzalcōātl, the Aztec creator god and giver of agriculture, who had long ago been banished in a celestial battle. Yet the loyal Aztecs awaited his return. In 1517, when Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico, many believed Quetzalcōātl had returned. This was not the case.