instal the new Romance with Chocolate - Hidden Items

To slake their growing thirst for chocolate, European powers established colonial plantations in equatorial regions around the world to grow cacao and sugar. Although the Spanish sweetened the bitter drink with cane sugar and cinnamon, one thing remained unchanged: Chocolate reigned as a delectable symbol of luxury, wealth and power-an expensive import sipped by royal lips, and affordable only to Spanish elites.Ĭhocolate’s popularity eventually spread to other European courts, where aristocrats consumed it as a magic elixir with health benefits. Spaniards Introduce Chocolate to Europe’s EliteĬhocolate arrived in Europe during the 1500s, likely brought by both Spanish friars and conquistadors who had traveled to the Americas. (In the 1500s, Aztecs could purchase a turkey hen or a hare for 100 beans.) By one account, the 16th-century Aztec ruler Moctezuma II drank 50 cups of chocolate a day out of a golden goblet to increase his libido.

Since they couldn’t grow it in the dry highlands of central Mexico, they traded with the Mayans for beans, which they even used as currency.

Wealthy Mayans drank foaming chocolate drinks, while commoners consumed chocolate in a cold porridge-like dish.Īs people of the Aztec empire spread across Mesoamerica in the 1400s, they too began to prize cacao. The Mayans, who considered cacao a gift from the gods, used chocolate for sacred ceremonies and funeral offerings. Chocolate played an important political, spiritual and economic role in ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, which ground roasted cacao beans into a paste that they mixed with water, vanilla, chili peppers and other spices to brew a frothy chocolate drink.Īncient Mesoamericans believed chocolate was an energy booster and aphrodisiac with mystical and medicinal qualities. Archaeologists have discovered the earliest traces of cacao in pottery used by the ancient Mayo-Chinchipe culture 5,300 years ago in the upper Amazon region of Ecuador.

Instal the new Romance with Chocolate - Hidden Items