Rachel Laudan

Of all the difficult things to turn into food (and most plants and animals are difficult to turn into food), cacao beans and their processing rank way up there. Let’s leave to one side the fermenting and cleaning and just think about the grinding of cacao. Because of the oil content, grinding cacao beans is [...]

Flappers with bobbed hair in 1920s America were of many ethnicities.  Here’s a translation of a song, Las Pelonas, the bobbed hairs, about the flapper Mexican Americans in Texas.  “Son flojas pa’l metate.”  They have no interest in grinding maize on the grindstone. And who can blame them.  As I suggest  here and friend Lesley [...]

Following up on an earlier post about turning cacao beans into chocolate, Lesley Téllez provides a timely lesson on what grinding chocolate on the metate (grindstone) is actually like. 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, [...]