Chocolate

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Christopher Columbus brought cacao beans back to Spain after his fourth voyage in 1502, and almost nothing came of it. The beans sat as a curiosity, not a beverage anyone at court wanted to drink. Chocolate's real introduction to Europe came later and more deliberately, in 1544, when representatives of the Kekchi Maya people of Guatemala traveled to visit the Spanish court and presented Prince Philip with gifts that included prepared chocolate, very likely bitter, spiced and frothed in the Mesoamerican style rather than the sweet drink Europe would later invent. What the Maya, Toltec and Aztec had been drinking for centuries by that point was not a treat but something closer to a ceremonial and social staple: ground, fermented cacao mixed with water and, depending on the region and the occasion, chili, cornmeal or vanilla, poured back and forth between two vessels to raise a foam considered essential to a properly made cup. The Aztec called it xocolatl. Once chocolate did take hold in Spain, it took hold as a drink, sweetened with sugar and served hot, and it stayed a drink in Europe for a very long time. Solid eating chocolate, and milk chocolate specifically, did not arrive until 1876 in Switzerland, more than three centuries after that first cup reached a Spanish prince, and roughly three thousand years after the beverage itself was first being made.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

For almost the entire span of its documented history, chocolate has been a liquid. Ceramic vessels from Mokaya sites on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico, dated to between 1900 and 1500 BCE, spanning both the Barra and Locona ceramic phases, carry theobromine residue, a chemical marker specific to Theobroma cacao among Mesoamerican plants, the earliest solid evidence that people were preparing and drinking a cacao beverage there. That is nearly two thousand years before the Maya civilization's Classic period, roughly 250 to 900 CE and generally considered its height, and roughly three and a half thousand years before chocolate reached Europe, introduced to the Spanish court in 1544. The solid chocolate bar most people picture when they hear the word is, by comparison, a very recent invention, and milk chocolate specifically was not brought to market until 1875 in Switzerland. Read against that timeline, the eating chocolate on a shelf today is closer to a brief coda than to the main story. The main story is a beverage, ground and fermented cacao beans mixed with water and other ingredients depending on the era and the region, that Mesoamerican societies were already refining before many other civilizations this atlas covers had reached their classical periods, and that took the rest of the world roughly three thousand years to catch up to.