Rachel Laudan

Well, after reading various newspaper stories about new information about the history of chocolate, I just couldn’t stop mulling over the idea that cacao (the tree whose fruit is the source of chocolate) was first used to make a kind of wine from the sweet pulp, something I reported on a couple of posts back.
Thanks [...]

Beer of cacao pulp? That’s what the residues on pots in Puerto Escondido in Honduras suggested to John S. Henderson and Rosemary A. Joyce of Cornell and the University of California, Berkeley respectively.
They reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that people there were fermenting the pulp about 1100 BC. [...]

Many countries still have drinks that go back deep into the past. One such is taxcalate from Chiapas in the far south of Mexico. Here’s the powder base: ground toasted maize, ground cacao, and ground achiote (Bixa orellana, used in many societies for color and also flavor). It turns the mixture [...]