Pain shot through my knees as I attempted to get up from the floor. My legs wobbled. The backs of my knees felt slick with sweat, and my T-shirt was damp. I shuffled the four paces to the jar of agua like an arthritic old woman. A blister was starting to form on my left palm. Why was I doing this to myself?

Of course, as you will see when you read her full account, she was using the physical motion of grinding to heat the metate.  Remember your physics lessons.  Mechanical work as force exerted over a distance.  That´s what Lesley was up to.  Maybe physics classes would be more immediate if students had to force the stone over the grindstone time and again to create heat.   It would have been easier, though not a whole lot easier, if the metate were heated. And of course it would have been hotter.

Anyway compare Lesley’s reality with this oh-so-cool gentleman, not a suspicion of sweat on his brow, not a hint of the weight of the body forcing that stone along.

Finally in a tweet, Lesley said she would never look at dark chocolate the same way again.  Well, even Lesley’s final puddle of chocolate was a long, long way from the dark chocolate so popular now.  That kind of smoothness can never be created with a grindstone.  It took the Industrial Revolution to produce that.   Another post coming soon on that.

Even if you have a grindstone, though, even if you know how to grind, it’s tricky to work with cacao because as you grind the mixture seizes up.  The time-honored Mexican way of dealing with this is to heat the grindstone.

Here in this classic engraving from Nicolás de Blegny´s 1687 Le bon usage du thé, du caffé et du chocolat an aproned gentleman is shown gingerly wielding the mano of the grindstone.  Underneath you can just see the brazier that is warming the stone. Cristina Potters, always informative on Mexican customs,  has a series of photos showing Doña Lupe of Patzcuaro in the state of Michoacán in Central Mexico grinding beans.  Since Doña Lupe says she processes 20 to 30 kilos a day, I suspect there are actually a number of other (and perhaps less elegantly dressed) women helping her.

Because given the hard work of grinding as I discovered here or as Lesley Téllez is now discovering, grinding over a heated grindstone is work indeed.

Now back to some archaeology.  A recent article in Nature pushed back the origin of chocolate consumption to 500 BC.

The first chemical evidence of cacao use came about 15 years ago after the analysis of residue from a vessel found at the Mayan site of Rio Azul in northeastern Guatemala and belonging to the Early Classic period of Maya culture—approximately A.D. 460. But Michael Coe, co-author of The True History of Chocolate, believes based on a slew of evidence, some linguistic, that the roots of chocolate go much further back to the great Olmec civilization, which preceded the Maya.

Mayan teapots have always fascinated Terry Powis, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin, which is how his investigation began. “Spouted vessels are very distinct from other Mayan ceramics and quite rare, typically associated with elite burials,” he explained.

Fortunately for Powis, fourteen such vessels were excavated in 1981 from a site at Colha, which lies close to the Caribbean coast in northern Belize, and have since been housed at the University of Texas, Austin. The Maya occupied Colha, which is known for its production of stone tools and its Preclassic spouted vessels, continuously from about 900 B.C. to A.D. 1300.

He scraped residue from the vessels and sent the samples to W. Jeffrey Hurst, who has a delicious job as an analytical biochemist at the Hershey Foods Technical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Using “high performance liquid chromatography coupled to atmospheric-pressure chemical ionization mass spectrometry,” Hurst analyzed all the samples. The first instrument separates all the components of the mixture and the other measures the molecular weight of each. Cacao is a blend of more than 500 chemical compounds. Of this tasty compendium the signature chemical is a compound called theobromine—the chemical marker of cacao.

Of the 14 samples analyzed, 3 were positive for theobromine, “chocolate, that is,” said Powis.

OK, well and good.  Theobromine in pots from 500 BC.  The trouble is that, if my memory serves, metates on legs do not appear until the Classical Period in Mexico, that is, until around 200 BC.

So whether you take Powis´s proven 500 BC or Michael Coe´s plausible earlier date of something close to 1000 BC, how were they grinding the chocolate? Or were they?  Were they just simply making nibs?

I’m sure some archaeologist has addressed this.  I just haven’t run across it.

It’s one of the few native American foodstuffs to make it immediately to the Old World.

And now, when anyone who has any pride in their foodie credentials praises the fresh and natural, chocolate, one of the most elaborately processed and industrialized foods around, is given a pass and allowed into the hallowed company of heirloom vegetables and fruits and grass fed meat in the foodie ranking of goodies.  That, and the fact that several new articles and books about chocolate have come my way, are the reason for this and three or four upcoming posts.

I’m going to start with contemporary artisanal processing. I’m re-posting (with permission and a little light editing) a lovely and non-technical blog post by Beatrice Misa in the Philippines about how she processed some beans from her family’s backyard–with one important modern innovation.  It’s about as clear and well-illustrated as anything I have encountered on the subject.

And it reminds us that cacao went east to the Philippines as well as west to Europe, along with the techniques for getting from pod to tablea (tablet of drinking chocolate).

Home-Processing Cacao

A thick cup of home-dried, home-roasted cacao with coconut milk from the garden. Sarap.

Three pods. You can tell if it is ready to eat when you shake it and the mass moves around, there is a layer of air between the skin and the fruit.

Cutting the pod up to share with friends.

Cacao arrived in the Philippines during the galleon trade.

The fruit has thin but fabulous sweet flesh.

Seeds drying.

The cacao tree is a humble one, not particularly beautiful, growing well only under canopies. Taken from the forest basins of the Americas, they have traveled well into our muggy, tropical island setting, cultivated in some large plantations and agroforestry areas, and in numerous backyards all over the country. There is still considerable backyard production and kitchen processing going on to turn cacao beans into tableas (tablets for making hot chocolate) most especially in the province.

All dried and ready to roast.

I took my fruit from my great-uncle’s house in Metro Manila. The pods had been given all these years to the gardener, whose mother would do the tedious processing. As I am not schooled in these matters, I enlisted the help of Wilma, who is from Zamboanga and has been eating and growing the stuff since childhood. I have read about cacao processing in books, but I wanted to get an idea of how it is processed by normal people for everyday consumption.

Seeds roasting on an iron skillet.

The pods at the top of this page yielded many seeds, covered by fruit pulp that is absolutely delicious. I would describe the taste as sweet yet tart, like a mangosteen or a nice yellow mango. The “beans”, which look a bit like rambutan seeds, were set out to dry. After they were suitably devoid of moisture (a few weeks, given the rain), they were roasted. I thought them to be a bit burnt, but Wilma insisted that was how they liked it.

An old brandy bottle.

Just as our house was filled with an aroma good enough to marry, we took the beans off and put them on a bilao (bamboo tray). Wilma used a glass bottle to crush the crunchy beans and force the skin to separate. She did this in a hurry, before everything cooled off.

Almost nibs, with motions like making pie dough.

More crushing.

We then ran out into the garden and got rid of the skins directly into the soil by the same movements that people use to winnow rice. The instructions of blowing the skin away with a fan seem quite comical and devoid of integrated daily exercise, once you see how gracefully the skin floats to the ground for decomposition.

Winnowing cacao.

What we are left with are cacao nibs, the much-hyped “superfood” and relative newcomer to the culinary world. A whiff at this point is pretty sublime.

Skinless nibs.

We decide to grind this for drinking chocolate. We first used a mortar and pestle, which proved to be too much even for our idle, chatty selves. A coffee grinder works nicely.

Too much work.

The moisture is coming up.

Cocoa fat ahoy.

Once the paste was finished, we scouted the kitchen for a suitable mold. This we found in an old spice jar cap. We washed the paprika out of that and pressed the paste in.

Standardization is important to us.

You can tamp it out with a bit of difficulty. Cacao, at this stage, becomes the consistency of your high school experiment of baking soda and water. It seems solid, but when you press your finger against it, there is a slow melting that occurs. Thus, you cannot scoop it out of the mold without damaging it, you must pound it onto a solid surface with some force.

From three pods, we get five 1-inch tableas.

My excitement was barely enough to contain, so I plunked two of these still-soft tableas into a pot and whisk them with water into tsokolate, kakaw, cacao, chocolate-eh, whatever you may call it if you are from these islands. I feel I’ve come a bit closer to the holy grail of my cacao-loving conquest.

Ready to drink.

Some things to change next time: It was a bit darkly roasted, more so than I am used to. Though delicious in its own way, I think I will decrease the roasting time. I was left with bits of the bean at the bottom of my cup, which I ate. Yes. I ate them, but it could have used a finer grind, so I may as well invest in a Turkish coffee grinder.

Now notice the one place where Beatrice cops out and abandons traditional methods.  The grinding of the roasted beans.  She puts them in the coffee grinder and presses the button.

So I’m fascinated by early Pacific voyages, the early Hawaiians or the galleons that every year from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century  sailed between between Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico and Manila in the Philippines.

Just a few ships, tiny by modern standards, stinking of bilge, with crews that barely had enough food and drink to make the journey (or sometimes didn’t) , laden to capacity and beyond with silks and porcelain, silver and spices, that linked Asia and America. So fragile, so stark the juxtapostion of luxury and squalor.

So what made it across these thousands of miles and what didn’t?

Well cacao was one thing.  Perhaps it was taken as seeds. We don’t know.  But  the Mexican way of grinding it, mixing with sugar and shaping it into tablets to be dissolved in hot water went.  Please Burnt Lumpia, tell us that they grind it on the metate.

In Mexico though from the colonial period to the present it was just as often mixed with wet ground maize (or now cornflour) to make a rich food-drink called champurrado, wonderful on a cold winter morning or evening.

What I love is this description of how in the Philippines chocolate tablets are mixed with glutinous rice and evaporated milk to make ‘champorado.’   Burnt Lumpia’s photos make it look like a pudding rather than a drink, I suspect there was a bit of cross-fertilization with American cornflour and milk chocolate pudding at the time when the evaporated milk snuck into the recipe.

Be that as it may, sticky rice, chocolate, and evaporated milk sounds pretty good to me, that unctuous chewiness. A sweet end to that terrifying journey.

Thanks to Susan Ji-Young Park for the link.

It prompted me to post a Mexican rival, though this one aims to sell shoes, not ice cream.

This ad of a model dripping with chocolate and holding a chocolate covered strawberry is for the Plaza del Zapato (shoe plaza). It’s the show place for foreign buyers of shoes made in León. León, in Central Mexico, is a boom town of 1-1/2 million people where shoes are the main business. They make shoes under contract for most of the name brands in the US. It’s a magnet for everyone in my little colonial town of Guanajuato because it has great shopping and hospitals.

Back to the ad. The slogan is “Fashion is temptation.” Oh, and by the way, fresa (strawberry) is Mexican slang for a spoiled little rich girl.

And scroll on through to one of Mexico´s favorite beverages. No, not tequila.

Chocomíl of course. And chocomíl’s advocate, Pancho Pantera. And a good bit of Mexican history from the history of corporations to the history of the poor.

But it’s Bob’s story and you should go to his site to follow this up (and to see why, following Bob, I’m spelling Chocomíl the way I do).

I’ve been mulling this over and here are my revised thoughts.

1. In the cases that Adam points to, this change occurred before it became difficult or impossible to buy blood in Europe (or so I assume). That is, before the last fifty years.

2. What did blood do in dishes? Several things. It gave a good color. It thickened the sauce. It changed the taste (though I’d need to experiment to see how). It perhaps avoided waste though the households who made such dishes probably did not have economy upppermost in their minds.

But also blood had lots of other properties and associations. It was essential to life. Perhaps humans were even formed from congealed blood. It was one of the four humors and those rich in blood were courageous, violent, passionate, highly sexed and tended to lack reason. For Christians, wine turned into the blood of Christ in the mass. For Jews and Muslims, blood was not to be consumed.

3. So why use chocolate instead of blood? Well, at one level it gives a good color. And it thickens a sauce. And it changes the taste adding complexity and a touch of bitterness.

But it is an incredibly expensive alternative. Blood, I suspect, was readily available and not terribly expensive in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Chocolate was rare and horribly expensive. So was it a sign of prestige to have chocolate instead of blood?

Or did it do the things that blood did but without bad consequences?As Adam points out, in prehispanic America it was probably associated with blood. But it’s not at all obvious that that association was accepted by Europeans. In fact, most of the debate that went on in Europe about how to fit chocolate into their nutritional scheme when they first encountered it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focussed on whether drinking chocolate was a food (like wine but unlike water) and thus broke the strict fast. That doesn’t seem relevant to its use in savory dishes.

So did people think, perhaps, that blood gave strength and courage without clouding the reason? Or did they have something else in mind? Lots to think about.

Thanks to the internet I was able to download the original article, “Chemical and Archaeological Evidence for the Earliest Cacao Beverages” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 48, November 27, 2007, 18937-18940. I have to admit it gave me pause.

Here’s the thesis. “The earliest cacao beverages consumed at Puerto Escondido [a site in Honduras dating to before 1000 BC] were likely produced by fermenting the sweet pulp surrounding the seeds.”

Now what’s the evidence?

a. Testing broken bits of ancient pottery.

The scientists used bits of pottery from thirteen different containers. They chose them because their elaborate shapes or special decoration suggested that they might have been used for some kind of cacao.

They boiled them with chemicals to see if they contained the chemicals theobromine and caffeine. Eleven tested positive for theobromine and/or caffeine. Caffeine is in cacao and in other plants used for drinks. Theobromine is only found in cacao. so far, so good.

Since alcohol evaporates easily, though, there is not, and cannot be, direct evidence that the drink in the containers was alcoholic. So the authors go on to add two additional arguments.

b. Using analogies from present-day Amazonia.

Natives in parts of Amazonia use the fruity pulp of the cacao to make both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks.

OK that’s an interesting fact. But the fact that natives of Amazonia ferment the pulp only establishes that it is possible to do so. It does not establish that the people of Puerto Escondido actually did so.

c. Using analogies from the way chocolate was prepared when the Spaniards arrived.

The Spaniards found that cacao seeds were ground, mixed with water and spices, and poured from one wide-mouthed container to another to make a foamy drink. The containers from Puerto Escondido had narrow necks. The researchers concluded they could not have been used to pour the liquid to make it foam.

OK. But this too seems to leave a huge gap. Why would the drink have had to be foamy? Today there are lots of non-foamy drinks made from cacao seeds, including the taxcalate I reported on in an earlier post. So finally the authors throw in a third consideration.

d. Using analogies from other parts of the world.

Sugary fruits in other parts of the world were used to make booze from an early period. Hence it fits that this happened in Mesoamerica too.

Yes, it would fit. But since the evidence seems so tenuous, I am simply not persuaded.

The Burden of Proof

In short, I think the burden of proof is still with the authors to produce a more compelling argument. This is a short article of only four pages. Maybe they have tried fermenting cacao pulp to see if it could be done with the vessels found in Honduras. Maybe they have tried residue analysis on metates from the area to see whether they were or were not used to grind cacao seeds. But until I see more compelling evidence, I am not persuaded that cacao was first used by fermenting the pulp.

They reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that people there were fermenting the pulp about 1100 BC. If you look at a cacao pod, it has a tough exterior a bit bigger and more pointy than, say, the skin of an avocado, with a white pulp inside in which the cacao beans nestle. They’re about the size and shape of a broad bean or fava bean.

They think their hypothesis is supported by the fact that the vessels have narrow spouts. They could not have been used to make foam on a ground cacao bean mixture. (This one I’m going to have to think about a bit).

But then could beans have been tasty leftovers ground to add flavor to toasted ground maize (as in my taxcalate post) just as achiote seeds are now ground to add color?

I may have grindstones on the mind but I don’t think I’m wrong that in Mesoamerica and elsewhere everything that could be ground was to see what happened.

Thanks to Ruth Alegria for this reference to an article in the November 13th New York Times.

I am not at all sure that Colman Andrews needs to concede the Mexican origins of mole poblano. As I suggest in my articles on “The Mexican Kitchen’s Islamic Connection” and my booklet on Puebla in the Global Gastronomic Geography (both on my food history page), it seems likely that mole had Mediterranean origins.

How do we trace the origins of dishes? One way is by looking at the basic techniques used to make them. Techniques are hard to invent and do not transfer easily from one culture to another.

The primary technique in mole poblano is of thickening and aromatizing a sauce with bread, nuts, and spices. This technique, perhaps going back to Roman times or beyond, was common in medieval Islam and in medieval Europe. It, and the spices such as cumin, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper and the like, went to Mexico with the Spanish.

There is a secondary technique in mole poblano. The use of rehydrated and ground dried chiles to color, aromatize and thicken the sauce. This I think is of Mexican origin because you never find anything like it in Europe or Asia.

Why do I say this is secondary? Why do I think a Mexican technique was added to a Mediterranean one rather than vice versa? Because it seems monumentally improbable that the Spanish, having accomplished a military conquest of Mexico, having had a good shot at a spiritual conquest of Mexico (see Robert Ricard’s Spiritual Conquest of Mexico first published in Spanish in 1947), are then going to say, oh, we love the local cuisine, we will abandon ours and accept yours.

Finally, there is the matter of chocolate found in both the Catalan picada and the mole. I suspect in mole it is there to balance the heat of the chiles, heat in the humoral sense. It seems to me a tertiary part of the mole, used as a spice and in small amounts.