Rachel Laudan

Why does chocolate seem to substitute for blood in savory European dishes? That’s a question Adam Balic has posed several times. He points, for example, to the use of chocolate in the Catalan dish mar y muntanya. I’ve been mulling this over and here are my revised thoughts. 1. In the cases that Adam points [...]

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. [...]

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. If [...]