HOW TO PREPARE A CACAO ELIXIR?
Using a Milk Frother
Using a Hand Blender
Using a Blender
The tools have changed, but the work of roasting and grinding fermented cacao beans, and mixing them with water to create a vitalizing food is a practice that goes back to early Mesoamerican civilizations. The Aztecs prepared chocolate by pouring the drink high up from one vessel to another, raising the foam of the beverage that was so prized for them.
For thousands of years, chocolate had been sipped, not eaten, since that Mexican Indian first turned cacao beans into "the food of the gods".
DID YOU KNOW?
Our story opens in Mexico and Central America, thousands of years before the Spanish Conquest. The European invaders had to name the plants, all new to them, that they had "discovered", and then struggle to fit them into schemes of classification and into the health theory of the time.
The face-off between the two worlds is nicely illustrated by the scientific name of our tree: Theobroma Cacao, given to it in 1753 by Carlvon Linné, the 18th-century Swedish scientist who invented the binomial system by which we now classify all living things.
The first part of this particular binomial, the name of the genus to which cacao (the "chocolate tree") belongs, is from the Greek and means "food of the gods".