Older than Cadbury, and long before Hershey was ever around
the name in chocolate was Montezuma the 16th century leader of the Aztec empire,
and today we are recreating his beloved chocolate drink.
Aztec chocolate, this time on Tasting History.
So a word about that name Montezuma.
That was not his name, or at least that's not how he would have said it.
It would have sounded more like Moteuchzuma, or Moteuchzumazin because the name
Motezuma is actually a phonetic spelling of the ruler's name that a Spanish writer put down.
There are about a dozen spellings of the name and none of them are particularly correct,
but for simplicity's sake we're going to stick with Montezuma today.
Also a huge thank you to Marcos Patchett who helped me with a
lot of the process and research for today's drink.
He is the author of 'The Secret Life of Chocolate', basically the chocolate Bible,
and I will put a link in the description to where you can get that.
It is everything you could possibly want to know about chocolate.
Now there is no true recipe for what Montezuma or the Aztecs were drinking
around the time of the conquest but there are lots of writings from the time period that describe
the process of making it, and describe many of the ingredients that would have been added. So
with the help of those sources we can kind of recreate
one of the possible variations that Montezuma would have drank.
To start we look at Bernardino de Sahagún's 'The
General History of the Things of New Spain' (The Florentine Codex)
which says "The seller of fine chocolate... she grinds cacao; she crushes them. She separates
them. She soaks them. She adds water sparingly... pouring it back and forth, aerates it;
she makes it form a head of foam."
So that's a bit of the process but then he also talks about different varieties of the drink.
"Green, made of tender cacao; honeyed chocolate made with ground dried flowers-
with green vanilla pods; bright red chocolate; orange-colored chocolate, rose-colored chocolate;
black chocolate, white chocolate".
So clearly the Aztecs had many ways of preparing this drink.
One thing we do know is that they tended to drink it cold or probably room temperature.
The Mayans would have drank hot chocolate. The Aztecs drank room temperature chocolate,
and I'm going to take two of the ingredients that Sahagún mentions which are the vanilla
and honey because those are delicious, and then I'm also going to add in
chili because many of the contemporary writings talk about chili being added to the chocolate,
but the one that I was most intrigued by was the red chocolate.
What possibly could have made it red?
Well in 1528 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo Evaldés gives us an idea of what it might be
"because the people are fond of drinking human blood,
to make this beverage seem like blood, they add a little achiote so that it turns red and
part of that foam is left on the lips and around the mouth and when it is red for having achiote,
it seems a horrific thing because it seems like blood itself."
So we'll throw some achiote in there as well.
Now his reasoning for why they drank it because it looked like blood and they like to drink blood
we kind of have to take with a grain of salt. One, all the Spanish writers
especially at this time had an agenda, so everything has to be taken in context.
Also one of his contemporaries Bartolomé de las Casas said Oviedo is
"one of the greatest tyrants, thieves, and destroyers of the Indies,
whose Historia contains almost as many lies as pages".
And that might be Tastorians is why history is hard,
because people just made stuff up, and it's hard sometimes to sort the fact from the fiction.
Anyway for this recipe what you'll need is:
one pound or 450 grams of cacao beans. That's kind of a cool word, cacao.
Two vanilla pods.
Two tablespoons of honey or more if you want it sweeter.
Two tablespoons of achiote powder. This is called annatto in English.
It's the same thing, just make sure that you're getting the powder instead of the paste because
the paste has other things in it, and instead of turning things red it turns things yellow.
And one teaspoon of cayenne pepper. You can use pretty much any hot pepper that
you want. I'm using cayenne because they had that at the time and I had that in my pantry.
So first we have to toast our cacao beans. I'm going to use the oven though you can also
do them in a skillet on the stove, or best is probably like a coffee roaster but who
has one of those on hand. So set your oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit or 149 degrees Celsius
and spread your cacao beans in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Then roast them for five
minutes before dropping the temperature to 275 degrees Fahrenheit or 135 Celsius for 15 minutes.
Then drop the temperature again to 265 degrees
Fahrenheit/130 celsius for another 10 to 15 minutes.
So once they're roasted we have to remove the shell from the bean in a process called winnowing,
and it is a pain in the tuchus.
Jose and I did it for about two and a half hours the other night and made quite the mess on the
floor because the shells are extremely thin and just kind of flake off, but the bean themselves
will break up, and they'll get all mixed in and it's kind of a pain to separate them, but
yeah. Anyway what you end up with are cocoa nibs. You can actually just buy cocoa nibs
and it's a lot easier but once you have your nibs all set then it's time to grind them.
An even more laborious task that was usually done on a metate but I'm using a food processor.
I did do an initial crushing with a mortar and pestle
just so that the food processor had less work to do because it takes a long time to get these into
a liquid state, and that's actually what you're going for. So I had to turn on the food processor,
run it for a few minutes, turn it off, let it cool down, turn it back on a few minutes,
turn it off, and let it cool down. It was a process, but eventually you should get to
a liquid called cacao liquor, but before we use that cacao liquor make sure to hit that
Like button as we take a look at why the Aztecs thought this chocolate was just so darn special.
Now while most writings about chocolate don't appear until the early 16th century
we know that the Olmecs were cultivating this food of the gods in Mesoamerica as far back as at least
1000 BC, and when I say food of the gods I don't just mean because I love it so much
I could start a religion around it, I actually mean that the first part of
the scientific name for the tree Theobroma Cacao means the fruit of the gods in Greek,
and according to the Popul Vuh, or the Mayan creation myth
it was one of the very first foods gifted to humans from the god Hun Hunahpu.
This cacao as they called it was so precious that only the elite were allowed to drink it.
One 16th century source saying, "The common people and the poor did not drink it...
If a commoner drank it it was considered scandalous."
And yet I am a commoner and I intend to drink it. Escandalo.
Also the beans themselves were so cherished that at Mayan weddings
they would exchange five cacao beans instead of rings when exchanging their vows,
and frankly it seems a lot more practical than a band of gold though just as expensive.
See the Mayans and the Aztecs use these beans as currency
and just like they were silver dollars upon seeing an Aztec drop some beans on the ground
a Conquistador said, "They got on their hands and knees to pick them up as if an eye had fallen."
I mean I'll cross the freeway to pick up a penny so I totally get it,
and to get an idea of what these beans were actually worth in 1545 market prices were set at
A good turkey hen is worth 100 full cacao beans or 120 shrunken cacao beans.
A small rabbit is worth 30. A chicken egg comes at the price of 2 cacao beans.
A large tomato at 1 cacao bean. A tamale is sold for 1 cacao bean.
And who says money doesn't grow on trees?
I mean honestly it makes just as much sense to use cacao beans as it does to use
silver for coins, and surely they're a lot harder to counterfeit right?
"The bad cacao seller,... the deluder counterfeits cacao...
with amaranth dough, wax, avocado pits
[broken into pieces which are then shaped like cacao beans].
He counterfeits cacao; he covers this over with cacao bean hulls;
he places this in the cacao bean shells... he throws them
in with wild cacao beans to deceive the people." I just said cacao a lot.
"Cacao to cacao."
Though it totally makes sense that the common people wouldn't be drinking cacao
if it's also their rent money.
Though even if you did want to drink cacao you might not be allowed to.
The Dominican Friar Diego Duran talked about
sumptuary laws that had been put in place that dictated,
"He who does not go to war, be he the son of a king, may not wear cotton feathers or flowers,
nor may he smoke or drink cacao."
It was a drink for the rich and the military,
and it makes sense that soldiers would need it because in the words of Hernan Cortes,
"The divine drink builds up resistance and fights fatigue.
A cup of this precious drink permits man to walk for a full day without food."
I mean I'd take chocolate over hard tack any day so I totally get it. Now
Cortes was possibly the very first European to actually taste this Aztec version of chocolate,
and that would have been in 1519 shortly after meeting Montezuma. What's cool is
that we actually know a lot about Montezuma, and how he was drinking this chocolate. "After the
hot dishes had been removed, every kind of fruit which the country produced was set on the table;
of which, however Montezuma ate very little every now, and then a gold vessel was handed to him
filled with a kind of liquor made from the cacao, which is meant for success with women...
I saw about 50 large pitchers filled with the same liquor brought in all frothy.
This beverage was also presented to the monarch by women, but all with profoundest veneration...
After the Great Montezuma had dined, dinner was served to the men of the Guard and the
other household officers, and I have often counted, on the table, over a thousand dishes...
These were followed by over two thousand frothing jugs of cacao drink."
Now while Diaz says that the vessel was actually gold,
other writers from the time say that they were calabash
gourds that were treated as if they were gold, so who knows.
Now judging by the sheer quantity of chocolate that they were drinking you'd think that everybody
in the world would absolutely love this drink but it seems to have been a rather acquired taste.
The Jesuit missionary José de Acosta said "It disgusts those who are not used to it,
for it has a foam on top or a scum-like bubbling..."
But even the most ardent opponent of chocolate could be won over.
"They drink it though it seems more suited for pigs than for men.
I was upwards of a year in that country without ever being induced to taste this beverage
and when I passed through a tribe, if an Indian wished occasionally to give me some,
he was very much surprised to see me refuse it,
and went away laughing. But subsequently, wine failing, and unwilling to drink nothing but water,
I did as others did. The flavor is somewhat bitter,
but it satisfies and refreshes the body without intoxicating:
the Indians esteem it above everything."
And the Spanish used that native esteem for chocolate to their advantage.
It's often said that many of the early missionaries would coax natives to come
to their churches with chocolate. Though that may have backfired.
See there was a story written by the Dominican Friar Thomas
Gage in the 1630s about the Bishop of Chiapas.
See the women of the church had become accustomed to drinking chocolate during mass
and the Bishop did not like that. He found it disruptive and told them that they could not drink
it any longer on pain of excommunication. Seems a little harsh.
But instead of giving up chocolate the women just gave up church. They stopped going for a month.
During which time the Bishop died supposedly poisoned by a cup of chocolate,
"And it became afterwards a proverb in that country:
beware the chocolate of Chiapa."
More like beware the women of Chiapa, I would think.
Tthough Thomas Gage very likely embellished the story so who knows what actually happened.
Now there's one last story of Aztec chocolate that I want to share with you, and that is about the
specific chocolate drink known as itzpacalatl. Now a reminder that Spanish sources from this
time often had hidden agendas, or not so hidden agendas, and so everything has to be kind of
taken with a grain of salt, but there are a lot of sources that agree on most of what this drink was.
So every year there was a ritual where either a slave or sometimes a captured warrior
was dressed up as the god Tezcatlipoca and this man,
"was to have no blemish; none whatsoever... he was to be free of all imperfections."
And for 40 days he would go around the city
singing and dancing and being treated and fed like a god,
except at night when they locked him up in a cage because everybody knew what was about to happen.
See nine days before the actual ceremony the elders came to him and said,
"O Lord, let your worship know that nine days from now
your task of singing and dancing will end.
Know that you are to die."
And he was supposed to be like yes I am so on board with this plan. This sounds
fantastic you guys.
But turns out not everyone was willing to play ball, and that's where the chocolate came in.
For "...if they saw that he became melancholy,
that he stopped dancing joyously... with the gaiety they desired,
they prepared a loathsome spell for him. They went immediately to procure sacrificial knives,
washed off the human blood adhering to them (the result of past sacrifices),
and with that filthy water prepared a gourd of chocolate giving it to him to drink....
He became almost unconscious and forgot what he had been told.
Then he returned to his usual cheerfulness and dance.
This drink was called itzpacalatl, which means 'water from the washing of the obsidian blades.' "
So yeah... I am definitely glad that I went with the honey and vanilla route
instead of the human blood route.
Definitely one of my better choices.
So once your chocolate is ground into a liquid, add the achiote and the cayenne,
and the honey.
You should also scrape the vanilla seeds in at this point but I forgot,
but luckily if you do forget you can just scrape them in later.
Then give it another mix so that everything is well incorporated.
Then put the chocolate into a pitcher and slowly add boiling water.
Now we know that they drank the chocolate at room temperature,
but I tried it with room temperature water and it just didn't mix.
Maybe they had a way of doing it,
I don't know. It just turned into like a grimy muck at the bottom of the pitcher, so
I used boiling water and then let it cool down, and it worked like a charm.
Also the foam on Aztec chocolate was famous. It is often depicted as just flowing over the top
and I'm not able to do that.
First of all it's thought that they had several different foaming agents, and
I don't have access to any of those agents so I'm not going to get that kind of foam. Then one of
the ways that they made this foam was by pouring it from pitcher to pitcher at a great height.
Kind of tried that, makes a huge mess and frankly it didn't really work. Again,
maybe they had a wonderful technique that just has been lost to time
but instead I'm using what is called a molinillo
and these were actually supposedly invented by the Spanish in Mexico just after the conquest,
but there are records of there being chocolate beaters that the Aztecs had
that they would beat their chocolate in pitchers.
So I'm guessing that they just changed the name and took credit for inventing it.
So mix your chocolate drink with the molinillo until you do get some foam
and then pour yourself a cup and enjoy.
And here we are Montezuma's chocolate.
So maybe they used calabash but someone had said gold,
so I went with the fancy gold, though my foam very, very quickly dissipated.
It just is what it is, but let's give it a drink.
It is actually very foamy.
It's bitter but it's not-
Hm. Hm! Okay.
There's that cayenne. x_x
Boom took me a second.
Aha, ha ha...
Yeah that's a little spicy you could probably add
a little bit less. It's not overwhelming though. It's-
And now I'm getting all the other flavors. The vanilla is in there, and
not really the honey. It's not as bitter as I thought it would be. Though
Jose tried it and he was just like "could we add some sugar?"
Though they didn't add sugar for a few decades, and that was in Europe.
One of the very first recipes is by Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma in his
work 'Chocolate or an Indian drink' and it touts a lot of the health benefits
of chocolate as well as saying it was an aphrodisiac and made women more fertile,
but my favorite part of the work is actually a poem
from the English version which says,
"Doctors lay by your irksome books
And all ye pettifogging rookes
Leave quacking; and enucleate the virtues of our chocolate."
I just like the term pettifogging along with
bedight. I think that it should make a comeback in our lexicon.
Anyway, whether Aztec chocolate or modern day chocolate [or choccy milk!],
I do encourage you to try yourself a glass of chocolate drink or milk sometime very soon,
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.