of corn, chocolate and cashews

"But we in England usually boyl the Chocolate with the water, and some to make it more dainty, though less wholesome, use therein Eggs and Milk."

-- Phillipe S. Dufour, 1685

I was wondering wondering when milk turned up in chocolate preparations, given that for most of the history of the bean it has been prepared into a drink made with water.

fragments of language and culture pieced together by Mesoamerican linguists, epigraphers and archaeologists locate the origin of chocolate in late Olmec civilisation, known as the Mixe-Zoquean language family or Izapan culture. they named chocolate, for which linguists have reconstructed the phonetic "kakawa".

before kakawa, there is evidence of an important Olmec process, which is thought to have contributed to chocolate: "nixtamalization". it refers to corn. pounding dried maize kernals into an edible form was probably hard work, and boiling them would've taken ages, so efficient Olmec housewives (they had "housewives"?) are credited with inventing the process which sees maize softened by cooking with white lime, wood ash or other possible additions such as burnt snail shells. Boiled and left to cool in this solution, the pericarp of each grain was easily removed and the soft remains could be made into a dough (masa in Spanish, nixTAMALLI in Nahuatl and hot TAMALES to Robert Johnson, yeah...) nixtamalization increases the amino acid content of the maize through the action of the alkali on protein, resulting in a nutritious, high protein food. take away the process (as Europeans did when they got their grubby mitts on New World maize, because they had mills that could grind the kernals without soaking) and you get pellegra and other deficiency conditions.

but corn is not chocolate. the tenuous but valid leap to be made here is that a civilisation which has time to sit around while the hard work has been taken out of subsistence preparation can invent a few luxuries, like ritual, religion and chocolate. hence prepared cacao drink is thought to have been a ritual substitute for human blood in sacrifices, a delicious supply of complex alkaloids and stimulation and probably an aphrodisiac. the Olmec origin myth, the saga of the Hero Twins, features the slain god of maize and son of the creator mother and father, his severed head hung on a tree in the underworld. the tree is depicted in later renditions as a cacao tree however is not an integral part of the myth. the potent element in the mythology is maize, which finds its way from the underworld to the earth via the Hero Twins, born on the earth to an underworld woman impregnated by the severed head. they later return to the underworld as part of their heroic conquest and raise their father, the maize god, from the dead, thus bringing maize, the staff of life, to the earth.

so little physical evidence remains of the Olmec culture. if they kept written records the material (perhaps bark) has not survived. what has been reconstructed is the root of cultural elements documented in Mayan codices and artefacts. cacao and the Hero Twins passed from the Olmec to the later Maya (descendants of the Classic Maya, who apparently spontaneously combusted), where cacao became increasingly important. gods are drawn holding cacao pods, and hieroglyphs explain that cacao is what the gods eat. other glyphs appearing in cacao related texts can be identified as meaning "water", which makes cacao drink; "foam", a word related to water; and "chilli" and "fruity", possible flavourings to add to the drink. additionally there is a verb which has no equivalent in English but translates as "to pour water/cacao from one vessel to another from a height sufficient to create foam". in this way cacao was dissolved in water, flavoured, and mixed through several pourings to create a frothy chocolate drink fit for the gods, but consumed by humans, maybe only the elite and as part of a daily worshipping ritual.

skipping the brief but brutal Toltec hegemony, the Aztecs and their tequila, (octli, a drink fermented from the agave plant), both civilisations continuing the chocolate-drinking legacy shown them by the Maya. and passing over that most arbitrary Line of Demarcation in 1493 drawn across the New World by the depraved Pope Borgia, and the subsequent Spanish conquest, we come to chocolate in Europe. it was made to the Mayan recipe, but with the addition of sugar to make the bitter alkaloids more palatable. the Spanish introduced the sugar, the French quickly picked it up and also made a sweet version, the Italians made a version too dark and roasted for the French palette, and the English, rightfully the brunt of many culinary jokes, made it with milk. obviously at some point the French also started doing this with the bowl-cup thing, but the earliest historical reference to chocolate and milk I could find is the aforementioned quote from a Frenchman unhappily exiled in England in 1685.

I like milk, so I see the merits in a chocolate and milk preparation. but there is no escaping that the taste of chocolate becomes adulterated by flavour of milk and cream. if you really want to taste chocolate, melt a high cocoa* solid content chocolate such as 70% in a little boiling water. I first came across this in a cake recipe devised by a chemistry nut who illuminated the taste adulteration presented by the addition of dairy. I was amazed by how right the claim is, especially as it seems more intuitive to control the splitting of chocolate by melting it in fat, such as butter or cream. you can actually melt chocolate with the addition of any hot liquid but careful stirring is required to produce a smooth ganache that doesn't split.

what else can carry the flavour of chocolate without ruining it? this question brings the history of chocolate to contemporary Northcote. if you go to Coco Loco on High St you can have cashew milk (or Kashew Mylk, to Mr. Loco), made I'm guessing in the same way as the Italian latte di mandorle (almond milk). cashew milk goes into Coco Loco's chocolates and truffles, and chocolate drinks, and numerous other tempting chocolatey creations which taste of pure chocolate instead of milk and cream, and are then completely vegetable-origin (except the white chocolate things, of which I must recommend the cardamom and pistachio drink and truffle).

nuts! chocolate in nut milk! está loco...

* cocoa is the preferred British English term for the part of the plant that the rest of the world refer to as cacao, although confusingly the unprocessed beans are called cocoa on the New York Commodities Market.

Images, quotes and references from The True History of Chocolate By Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe.

Thames & Hudson, 2000.