Carla Martin

If we go back thousands of years to Mesoamerica, which today is Central America and southern Mexico, we see that cacao, the raw material that we know of that goes on to become chocolate in the present, was used in four different ways.

For one, it was used as a food flavoring, and that would be for a sandwich.

savory application.

You might think of something like mole in that way.

It was used as a beverage, so something that could be drunk.

There were thousands of recipes that used cacao as a beverage.

Chocolate was only one of them.

The third was as a spiritual offering.

And this is significant because people would use cacao in weddings, in baptisms, in other ritual ways.

That might be where we got some of the first associations of

of cacao with ideas like romance.

And then, of course, the fourth use of it was as a currency.

So at that time, literally the seeds of the cacao were the money that grew on trees, and people could use cacao beans as a local coin.

You know, originally in some of the recipes that involved cacao, indigenous people would use local sweeteners, things like honey or agave.

And so the flavors that they were consuming were not all that different from what we consume today.

So they would put cacao, maybe corn, maybe some kind of edible flower.

Vanilla is perhaps the most famous one in the present.

And then, of course, the sweetener like honey or agave.

In the present, due to European conquest in Mesoamerica and the move of different commodity crops around the world, what people most have access to is what they began to have a lot of access to by about the 1700s, 1800s, and that's the presence of cane sugar or beet sugar.

That is why today we see chocolate as sweet.