A test to see who really knows the history of chocolate: do you know what your first recipe was? Well the iFood News brings a revelation to the chocoholics on duty: she wasn't sweet at all.
If nowadays so many people consider chocolate to be a true delicacy of the gods, this divine status was already evoked when the delicacy it emerged almost 5,000 years ago in the region of Central America and Mexico.
After all, the mayans, one of the first civilizations to use cocoa to make chocolate (or rather, xocolatl), offered this food to the gods and revered it. O xocolatl it was also consumed when completing important transactions.
However, this derivative of the fruit of the cocoa tree had very little to do with the forms we know it today.
No tablets, chocolates or bars: xocolatl It was a drink, made from a combination that is still successful today, chocolate and pepper.
Yes that's right. Pepper was part of the first recipe for xocolatl, along with roasted and ground cocoa beans, water and corn flour. The result was a bitter drink, hence the name xocolatl, which means “bitter water”.
The Mayans, in fact, were not the pioneers in the history of chocolate. They inherited the recipe from one of the oldest civilizations in America: the Olmecs, the first to make drinking chocolate from the cocoa plant, around 5,000 years ago.
Another ancient civilization, that of the Aztecs, also fell in love with the drink. In fact, they believed that it was actually a gift from the gods. Furthermore, they used cocoa beans as currency — and it was considered more valuable than gold. This happened around the 7th century.
Europe: a new chapter in the history of chocolate
With the colonization of America by European countries, cocoa reached the Old Continent, where the cocoa recipe xocolatl changed, transforming it into the chocolate we know today.
Cocoa arrived in Spain in 1585. Little by little, cocoa plantations appeared on the continent, cultivated by enslaved labor.
It didn't take long for chocolate shops to appear in cities like London and Amsterdam. But the original bitter drink gained a sweet flavor thanks to the addition of cane sugar, as well as cinnamon and other spices — ingredients brought from the “New World”.
The story of chocolate didn't stop there. The recipe would still change in the 19th century, when milk entered this composition. In 1847, British chocolatier JS Fry and Sons created the first chocolate bar, carved from a paste consisting of sugar, chocolate liquor and cocoa butter.
The return of the bitter
The world really turns around. Not only has chocolate with pepper returned to the agenda in recent years – it has even become the name of a soap opera – but the classification of bitter has become increasingly associated with quality chocolate, with health benefits.
With antioxidant properties, chocolate with a high cocoa content – and smaller amounts of milk and sugar – can be an ally for controlling blood pressure and stabilizing cholesterol and glucose levels in the body.
Whatever the flavor of chocolate, cocoa remains on the rise in Brazil, which is the 7th largest producer in the world —and also the 7th largest exporter of the product and its derivatives, according to ApexBrasil (Brazilian Export and Investment Promotion Agency).
To celebrate this fruit, here we celebrate the Cocoa Day on March 26, and the date was established precisely to promote debates about cocoa trees in Brazil.
