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Open my wish list →Chocolate is made from the beans of the cacao tree. Here are three true things about the tree, its flowers and its pods.
The cacao tree is a small evergreen tree, 6 to 12 metres tall, native to the tropics of the Americas. Its name, Theobroma, comes from the Greek for "food of the gods".
SourceCacao flowers grow in clusters straight from the trunk and older branches. They are pollinated by tiny flies called biting midges.
SourceA cacao pod is 15 to 30 centimetres long and ripens yellow to orange. Inside are 20 to 60 seeds, usually called beans, in a white pulp.
SourceA frothy drink
The Mokayan people, on the Pacific coast of Chiapas in Mexico, drank bitter, frothy, watery cacao drinks by 1900 BC. Later, across Mesoamerica, the most popular thing to add to chocolate was dried and ground chilli. Before serving, chocolate was poured from a height between vessels. This made a brown foam that people prized. To the Aztecs, chocolate was one of their two most important drinks, and they made the people they conquered pay tribute in cacao. The beans themselves were used as money by at least 400 BC. A record from 1545 notes that thirty beans could buy a small rabbit.
SourceAcross the sea
Spanish conquistadors came across cacao in 1519 and brought it to Spain. The earliest written evidence says it reached the Spanish court in 1544. But the first official shipment of cacao to Europe was not recorded until 1585. To suit Spanish tastes, chocolate was often sweetened, flavoured with familiar spices and served warm. From Spain, chocolate spread to other European nations: to Portugal, to Italy in the 17th century, and then outwards. Chocolate arrived in England from France around 1657. It was served in coffee houses to anyone who could pay.
SourceTheobroma cacao
Chocolate makers have long recognised three main groups of cacao beans: Forastero, Criollo and Trinitario. The most prized, rare and expensive is the Criollo group, the cocoa bean used by the Maya. Beans of the Forastero group are used in 80 per cent of chocolate.
SourceTheobroma grandiflorum
Cupuaçu is a rainforest tree related to cacao, native and common throughout the Amazon basin. It usually grows 5 to 15 metres tall. Its white pulp has a smell described as a mix of chocolate and pineapple, and chocolate made from cupuaçu is called cupulate.
SourceTheobroma bicolor
The mocambo is also called the jaguar tree or pataxte, and it grows in Central and South America. The Aztecs grew it alongside cacao to make chocolate. In open fields it reaches 3 to 8 metres, but in the shade of a forest it can grow to 25 to 30 metres.
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