When: July 7
Chocolate Day on July 7th celebrates one of the world's most beloved flavors — but the chocolate we eat today would be unrecognizable to the people who invented it. The Olmec, Maya, and Aztec consumed xocolatl as a bitter, spicy beverage, often fermented and mixed with chili and achiote. The sweet, solid chocolate we know is a European transformation that took centuries to develop.
For most of its 3,000-year history, chocolate was a spicy, bitter drink consumed exclusively by Mesoamerican warriors and priests — sugar and solid bars are a recent European invention.
In Aztec Mexico, ten cacao beans would buy you a rabbit. One hundred would buy you a slave. The cacao bean was currency, the raw material of power, and a sacred substance — cacao pods carved in stone appear on temple walls throughout Mesoamerica, and the Maya included chocolate in ritual offerings to the gods. The Aztec drink xocolatl (bitter water) was served cold, mixed with chili, vanilla, and achiote, and reserved for warriors, priests, and the elite. Spanish explorers tried it in the early 1500s and found it disgusting. The cacao tree (Theobroma cacao — "food of the gods") originated in the tropical Americas, with archaeological evidence of consumption among the Olmec people of southern Mexico as far back as 1900 BCE. The Maya and Aztec built civilizations partly around it. European transformation took a century of modification: adding sugar, eliminating the chili, heating it, adding milk. By the 17th century, sweetened hot chocolate was fashionable in Europe, consumed in...