Gryphon's Aeire Food Fact - Chocolate Tree

 From Peter -- in Belize

Chocolate Tree
Theobroma cacao L.
STERCULIA FAMILY

Sterculiaceae

"Food of the gods"

that is the literal and apt translation of the name Theobroma. It was given
to the chocolate tree and its genus by the great botanist Carolus Linnaeus,
creator of the modern system of scientific nomenclature. The name reflects
not only the flavor of chocolate, but its history as well.

In 1519, the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez and his soldiers witnessed a
strange ceremony at the court of the Aztec emperor Montezuma. Seated high
on a golden throne, observed by his subjects with reverent awe, the "living
god" repeatedly drank from a golden goblet containing a beverage called
chocolati. When the Indians honored the Spanish by offering them the
bitter, dark brown drink, they explained that the beans from which it was
made had come from paradise, and so each sip would bring wisdom and
knowledge. So valuable were the beans to the Aztecs that they served as a
form of currency: 4 beans could buy a wild turkey; 100 could purchase a
live slave.

Cortez praised chocolate effusively in a letter to the Spanish ruler,
Charles V, and brought a supply of the beans home with him. Enthusiasm for
the new drink, made more palatable by the addition of sugar and vanilla (an
improvement said to have been made about 1550 by the nuns of a Mexican
cloister), spread to the French court.

There it was considered an aphrodisiac and happily imbibed by those who
could afford it. The English added milk to the formula and established
chocolate houses, as did the Dutch, where aristocrats sipped the heavenly
drink in privacy.

Native to the tropics of Central and South America, the chocolate tree is a
widely branching evergreen that may reach 40 feet in height, but is pruned
to about 20 feet on plantations. Small fragrant clusters of pink or creamy
flowers, borne directly on the trunk or main branches, develop into woody,
football-shaped. fruits up to 1 foot long. These range in color from yellow
to reddish purple to brown. Within each fruit, embedded in a gelatinous
pinkish pulp, are about 50 bitter seeds, or cocoa beans.

Harvesters scrape the beans and pulp together into fermenting troughs,
where the sweet pulp liquefies and the beans lose their astringency. Then
the beans are dried, roasted, shelled, and processed into their constituent
parts. 

Fat—

more than 50 percent of a cocoa bean—is rendered into yellowish cocoa
butter. Unlike most fats, it is not greasy. It also has a pleasant odor and
does not easily become rancid, and so it is prized for use in soaps and
other toiletry products, as well as in suppositories and soothing ointments.

The fat-free powdered residue is cocoa; mixed with sugar and hot milk or
water, it is the warming, energizing drink that northerly peoples still
regard as the food of the gods. Various grades of chocolate candy, from
smooth milk chocolate to the hard, bitter blocks used by bakers, are made
by combining the cocoa with assorted mixtures of cocoa butter, milk,
vanilla, and sweeteners. Because it is rich in the stimulants caffeine and
theobromine, chocolate combats fatigue and gives a burst of quick energy.
This is why soldiers have carried chocolate into battle from the period of
the Civil War to modem times. In addition, recent research has found that
chocolate has a soothing effect on troubled minds.


Displayed on: Thursday - 24 May 12 - 04:59:45