Eating chocolate is not something new, however. The Mayan people munched it over 2,000 years ago! Later on, the Aztecs loved chocolate, too. Without these ancient chocolate-lovers, you wouldn’t have chocolate today.

The Maya lived in Central America. Tropical forests full of unusual birds, insects and plants covered their land—including the “chocolate tree.”

Chocolate, or cacao, trees grow to be at least 30 feet tall. They look quite strange with dozens of football-shaped pods sprouting from their trunk and branches. Each pod holds handfuls of gooey white pulp and about 30 cacao beans stacked one on top of the other.

At harvest, the Maya scooped out the sticky white cacao beans and laid them in a pile. They covered the beans with big leaves and left them to ferment, or decay. This process made the beans turn brown. Five or six days later, the Maya spread the beans out to dry in the hot sun. Finally, they roasted the dried beans on a stone griddle and crushed them using stone tools called mano (MAH-noh) and metate (meh-TAH-tay). This made a thick, smooth chocolate paste left to harden.

The Maya stood and carefully poured this mixture back and forth between a pot in their hands and another at their feet. A thick layer of chocolaty foam formed on top. They considered the foam the best part.

Every Mayan guzzled chocolate. However, the richest drank theirs from decorated pots made by specially-trained artists. Some of these chocolate pots have been found by archeologists, many with traces of chocolate still in them.

Mayan merchants who traveled far from home traded cacao beans for other precious articles such as cloth, jade, and feathers. This introduced cacao beans and chocolate to the neighboring Aztec Empire.

Cacao quickly became very important to the Aztecs, as well. They bought and sold everything from clothes to cookware to food with cacao beans. For example, a turkey sold for 100 beans while a salamander, an Aztec delicacy, only four. Money really did grow on trees!

Unfortunately, the Aztecs had a problem. Their land couldn’t grow cacao trees!

They solved this by trading with the Maya and taking beans from the people they ruled over.

Only the wealthiest Aztecs could afford to drink chocolate. Montezuma II, the last Aztec emperor, especially liked the spicy drink. He and his many palace guards drank about 2,000 pots of chocolate every day. Montezuma drank 50 pots himself. Luckily, Montezuma’s royal warehouses held about 960 million cacao beans, enough for more than 25 million chocolate bars today.

The world of chocolate couldn’t stay the same forever. In 1517, everything changed. Spanish explorer Hernan Cortés marched his way to the home of Montezuma II. There, he became the first European to taste chocolate.

When Cortés returned to Spain, he took cacao beans and the recipe for Aztec chocolate with him. At first, the Spanish people didn’t like the bitter chocolate drink from the New World. The addition of sugar quickly changed their minds. Soon the sweet chocolate drink became very popular in Spain. Within 100 years, it spread to the rest of Europe.

The next time you wander into your corner grocery store, look around at all the chocolate. Let your mouth water, your taste buds tremble, and give a silent thanks to the Maya and Aztecs from long ago. After all, where would chocolate be without them?

Illustration Copyright © 2008 Nicole Falk

Text Copyright © 2008 Tamara Kramer