Everyone loves chocolate and it’s one of the best and easiest Christmas gifts to buy. We show our love for chocolate by eating billions of pounds of it each year. And I’m not just talking about Snickers and M&Ms, although they are my favorites. I’m talking gourmet––prepared in a sophisticated and meticulous fashion, using high quality ingredients. Gourmet chocolate makes a rich, creamy, luxurious gift, and is an all-time favorite holiday present to give and receive.
Chocolate dates back as far as 2000 BC and is thought to have originated in the Amazon. It is derived from the cacao tree and was used by the Maya culture, where they would harvest, ferment, roast, and grind the seeds into a paste. When mixed with water and other ingredients, “this paste made a frothy, spicy chocolate drink," yet the taste was very bitter.
In both the Maya and Aztec cultures, chocolate, then called xocoatl or cacahuatl (meaning “bitter water"), played an important role in religious and social lives. To the Maya, the cocoa pods symbolized life and fertility, and were often used in religious rituals; they were referred to as the gods' food. The Aztecs believed that wisdom and power came from eating the fruit of the cacao tree, and that it had nourishing, fortifying and aphrodisiac qualities. Interesting too is the fact that cocoa beans were used as currency.
Chocolate has evolved throughout history from a bitter drink to its current forms today, creating a multi-billion dollar industry with plenty of controversy surrounding its "dark side". History also tells us that at the end of the fourteenth century, Columbus was the first to bring back cocoa beans from the New World to Europe and he presented them to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, yet their potential was overlooked. It was Hernando Cortez who brought cocoa beans to Spain in the fifteenth century and saw their value. We can also credit Cortez and the Spanish for being the first to blend the bitter drink with sugar and other ingredients, moving us toward the mixture that we enjoy today. However, it was the French who were the first to package chocolate as a gift, when in 1643, the Spanish Princess Maria Theresa was betrothed to Louis XIV of France. She gave her fiancé an engagement gift of chocolate, packaged in an elegantly ornate chest.
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Article comments
1 - Irene Wagner
Oh Christine, you gotta leave that health & fitness job at the door, sometimes. This article was GREAT until the second sentence in #10 :)
2 - Cindy
I'll repost some info on child slavery in the chocolate industry.
Some children are kidnapped and sold. Other children, from impoverished families, are lured with the promise of work. It's easy for a slave-trader to trick a 10-12 year old boy who is excited by the prospect of being able to care for his family. These children are from desperate poverty. Some hope to save their family by finding a job to support them.
They will be beaten, malnourished, and will sleep locked in a tiny room on the floor with a can to use for a toilet. Some will be murdered. Almost all will never even get to taste chocolate. Chocolate is for the privileged.
Every time you buy it, I want you to say to yourself: 'I am supporting child slavery.'
The only way to assure that child slave labor is not used in the chocolate you buy is if the label says fair-trade. If you buy non-labeled chocolate you are supporting child slavery. Tell a friend.
3 - Christine
LOL, Irene and Thanks Cindy: I actually thought of YOU when I added the third paragraph about the "dark side" of chocolate. So it is labeled "fair-trade"? Can you give us some specifics?
Christine
4 - Christine
Yes, Cindy please enlighten us further on "Fair Trade Chocolate". Will you do an article for BC about it. Please, I am genuinely interested!!!
5 - Joanne Huspek
You can gift me with chocolate any day.
6 - Cindy
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