The earliest record of chocolate was over a thousand years ago in the South American rain forests, around the Amazon and Essequibo rivers, where the tropical mix of high rain fall combined with high year round temperatures and humidity provide the ideal climate for cultivation of the Cocoa Tree.
The tree was worshipped by the Mayan civilization who believed it to be of divine origin, hence it's generic Latin name meaning 'Food of the Gods'. Cocoa is a Mayan word meaning "God Food", Cocoa was later corrupted into the more familiar ' Cocoa ' by Europeans. The Maya brewed a bitter sweet drink by roasting and pounding cocoa beans with maize and Capsicum peppers and letting the mixture ferment, for use in ceremonies as well as for drinking by the wealthy and religious elite, they also ate a Cocoa porridge.
The Aztecs who came after the Mayan's also prized the beans highly, but because the Aztec civilization was at higher altitudes in the Andes , the climate was not suitable for cultivation of the tree, so they acquired the beans through trade and the spoils of war. The Aztecs used them as currency - 100 beans could buy a Turkey or a slave - and tribute or Taxes were paid in cocoa beans to the Aztec emperors. The Aztecs, like the Mayans before them, also enjoyed Cocoa only as a beverage made from the raw beans which featured prominently in ritual and as a luxury available only to the very wealthy. The Aztecs called this drink Xocolatl, the Spanish conquistadors found this almost impossible to pronounce and so corrupted it to Chocolat, and the English further changed this to Chocolate.
The Aztec Emperor, Montezuma - who is quoted as saying of Xocolatl: "The divine drink, which builds up resistance and fights fatigue. A cup of this precious drink permits a man to walk for a whole day without food" - regarded it as an aphrodisiac and reputedly drank it fifty times a day from a golden goblet.
In fact, the Aztec's prized Xocolatl well above Gold and Silver so much so, that when Montezuma was defeated by Cortez in 1519 and the victorious 'conquistadors' searched his palace expecting to find Gold & Silver, all they found were huge quantities of cocoa beans. The Aztec Treasury consisted, not of precious metals, but Cocoa Beans.
CHOCOLATE IN EUROPE
Xocolatl! or Chocolat or Chocolate as it became known, was first brought to Europe by Cortez, by this time the conquistadors had learned to make the drink more palatable to European tastes by mixing the ground roasted beans with sugar and vanilla, thus offsetting the bitterness of the Aztec drink.
The first chocolate factories soon opened in Spain, where the dried fermented beans brought back from the new world were roasted and ground, and by the early 17th century chocolate powder - from which the European version of the drink was made - was being exported to other parts of Europe. The Spanish kept the source of the drink - the beans - a secret for many years, so successfully in fact, that when English buccaneers boarded what they thought was a Spanish 'Treasure Galleon' in 1579, only to find it loaded with what appeared to be 'dried sheep's droppings', they burned the whole ship in frustration. If only they had known, chocolate was so expensive at that time, it was worth it's weight in Silver, if not Gold, Treasure Indeed!
Within a few years, the Cocoa beverage made from the powder produced in Spain had become popular throughout Europe , first in the Spanish Netherlands then Italy , France , Germany and - in about 1520 - it arrived in England.
