Cacao Fermentation and Chocolate Making

The fermentation, drying, roasting and grinding of cacao beans into the paste and, eventually, the bar that give chocolate its flavor, a tradition beginning in Mesoamerica where the earliest evidence of a cacao-based drink dates to around 1900 to 1500 BCE among the Mokaya people of the Soconusco region on the modern Mexico-Guatemala border. Among the Maya and the Aztec, chocolate was drunk frothed, unsweetened and often spiced with chili, reserved largely for rulers, warriors and ceremonial occasions such as weddings and funerals, and was valuable enough to serve as a form of currency. Only after cacao reached Europe was it sweetened with sugar and eventually reworked into the solid chocolate most familiar today, but the dish it still marks most visibly on this atlas is Mexico's own mole poblano, whose sauce includes chocolate among many other ingredients.