The New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes

Book by Presilla Maricel E

Growing Up with Cacao
 
For many people, tasting just a small piece of chocolate can trigger a flood of memories, whether it's of their first Hershey's bar or that special cake baked for a birthday or a graduation. It's not quite like that for me. I am fortunate to be a Latin American with long memories drawn from something closer to chocolate's origin. I first got to know it as a fruit.
 
 
a strange and wonderful fruit
 
When my father told me about big, strange-looking fruits that sprouted right out of the tree bark and were filled with the beans that are the source of all chocolate, I formed a mental picture of thick-skinned papayas full of fragrant Hershey's chocolate kisses. Then one day he brought home about a dozen cacao pods from his mother's family farm at the eastern end of Cuba, about eighty miles from our home in Santiago.
 
They were large oval fruits of many shapes and hues: some rounded and smooth, others longer with bumpy skins and long-ridged grooves, colored in splendid shades of orange, russet, yellow, and green. I was entranced until my father cut open the first pod. Instead of chocolate-colored beans to eat like candy, I found a strange mass of lumpy, tan-colored seeds enclosed in a sticky, glistening ivory pulp that did not even smell like chocolate.
 
My father scooped out the inside of the pod and gave me some of the pulp to suck on. It had a refreshing sweet-tart flavor and a wonderful aromatic quality that today reminds me of lychees. If you ever taste fresh cacao fruit, you will understand what attracted people to it long before the discovery of chocolate.
 
I would have eaten the lot happily, but my father, who is an artist, had other plans. He had brought them back to paint. For days I had to endure the sight of those luscious pods arranged in a basket until they shriveled up. I still remember how much I longed to eat that cacao and to go to the place it came from.
 
Several years later I visited the farm, high in the forested mountains of the upper Jauco River, not far from the southeastern tip of the island. My great-grandparents, Desideria Matos and Francisco Ferrer, who originally came from Alicante, Spain, settled in this isolated and godforsaken area at the end of the nineteenth century. As the Cubans put it, they quickly became aplatanados—that is, they went native like plantain trees. In their new home at Cañas, they began a typical anything-and-everything, mixed-growth farm, living off the land by growing and processing the things they needed, right down to their own home-roasted coffee beans and home-crushed sugarcane juice, which they used for sweetening when they couldn't get commercial sugar. Cacao was sold for cash.
 
The cacao farm was small and lush, with the deceptively chaotic look characteristic of the tropics, where many kinds of plants are crammed together in a planned give-and-take. My father's elderly uncles and their children tended the cacao growth and harvested the fruit with sharp blades fixed on long poles. The pods were collected in a rustic rectangular basket called a catauro, made from the woody fruit sheath of the royal palm. The men cut open the pods with machetes, removed the mass of beans embedded in the white pulp, and squeezed out as much pulp as they could by hand. Then the beans were spread out on a cedar tray fitted with wheels to dry in the sun. At night, or when it rained, the tray was wheeled into a thatched shed. After a few days, the pale tan beans changed to a reddish brown and were ready to be bagged for sale.
 
 
taking chocolate into their own hands
 
Meanwhile, at the ranch house, another batch of beans was being transformed into chocolate. The aunts and cousins roasted the cacao outdoors—like coffee beans—over a wood fire in a large blackened kettle. Then, they ground the roasted beans into a sticky, fragrant paste in a hand-cranked corn grinder and mixed it with sugar and flour. They rolled the paste between their palms to make balls the size of duck eggs. These were set out to dry. When needed, they grated chocolate off the hard surface, dissolved the gratings in water or milk, and heated it to make a thick hot drink.
 
How powerful and knowledgeable these women seemed to me, taking chocolate into their own hands! Later I would always remember that I belonged to those who live with cacao and know it personally, as a tree, a fruit, an ordinary household preparation.
 
Today thousands of such people still live in the cacao-growing regions of Latin America, where the plant originated and chocolate reached its early heights of development. For them, this is a fruit as rooted in the land as potatoes. They are not mystified or intimidated by even the finest commercial chocolates. They, too, have taken a batch of beans and made chocolate.
 
The chocolate that so fascinated me was meant to be consumed as a drink—the way the Maya and Aztecs and their subjects knew cacao, the way it is mainly used throughout Latin America today. Wherever cacao grows in the New World, someone is harvesting the beans on a small farm or buying them by the kilo at a market to make the same kind of cacao balls for drinking chocolate that my peasant family made at Cañas.
 
That early memory links me with Latin American chocolate at its plainest and most democratic, economically extended with thickeners. Yet the Ferrer clan's rough-and-ready drink also lingers in my memory when I taste the sophisticated hot chocolate of small artisanal producers in other Latin American regions, from Oaxaca in Mexico to the Paria Peninsula in Venezuela. The complexly layered interaction of fine, skillfully treated cacao with half a dozen Old and New World spices transports me to Spanish colonial drawing rooms with elegantly gowned ladies sitting on low, cushioned stools to sip frothy, spiced hot chocolate from hand-painted gourds or thin porcelain cups.
 
 
bridging the information gap: Getting to Know Chocolate from Bean to Bar
 
In 1994, when I was asked to be a marketing consultant for Chocolates El Rey, a respected Venezuelan chocolate producer, I began to taste, travel, read, correspond, and experiment with an eagerness far beyond what was required of me. Once again I found myself drawn to aspects of the subject that didn't seem to be a part of the general European and American chocolate experience. I saw that even at high levels of connoisseurship, there was an information gap—a lack of communication between those who consume and cook with chocolate and those who produce it.
 
Probably the watershed events in my realization were the Venezuelan tours on which I led groups of American and European chefs and journalists through some of the finest cacao plantations in the world. As they walked through the farms, I saw their vision of chocolate expanding to take in the living tree and everything that goes into its nurture.
 
The true appreciation of chocolate quality begins with a link between the different spheres of effort. To know chocolate, you must know that the candy in the box or the chef's creation on the plate begins with the bean, with the complex genetic profile of different cacao strains. Think how impossible it would be to make fine coffee with the coarse, acrid beans of Coffea robusta. You must know also that the flavor of the finished product further depends on people carrying out careful, rigorous harvesting and fermentation practices.
 
Today, most informed cooks and diners appreciate the many intertwined factors that add up to quality in products like tea, coffee, cheese, and wine. Somehow chocolate was slow to receive the same scrutiny. My Venezuelan trips showed me that chocolate lovers were eager to bridge the gap when offered the opportunity. I detected something cooking, a quiet revolution in the perception and enjoyment of chocolate. I started to see a deeper understanding of cacao's essential nature among a new breed of chocolate manufacturers in developed nations, spearheaded by new outreach efforts on the part of enlightened growers, manufacturers, and researchers in some cacao-producing countries.
 
Now, perhaps, you will understand the original mission of this book: to encourage as many chocolate lovers as possible to marvel at the pre-Columbian beginning and Spanish colonial flowering of chocolate. I wanted them to understand the many factors—genetic, chemical, environmental—that determine the quality of chocolate at all stages, from the fertilized flower to the foil-wrapped bar. I wanted to take them inside the thinking of the scientists who identify and develop important cacao strains. And I wanted them to see the human face of cacao farming. The life of a plantation worker in the Third World should mean as much to the chocolate lover as that of the chef who transforms a bar of chocolate into a work of art.
 
It has been wonderful for me to see how these issues have gradually become a part of people's awareness in talking about chocolate. I like to think that my book had something to do with it. I can't count the number of times that chocolate makers, chefs, and food lovers have told me how much they appreciated my book and how it changed their perception of this wonderful food.
 
 But cacao and chocolate history have moved fast in the last eight years. Today anyone trying to sketch an overall picture must reckon not only with breathtaking new developments in fields from archaeology to modern cacao genetics, but with a swift tide of geopolitical changes that are redrawing the world map of chocolate. The chocolate industry also has changed, both to satisfy the new expectations of savvier consumers and to adjust to new realities in the world cacao supply.
 
It is for these reasons that in a surprisingly short time, I knew that I would have to revisit the book. I began to glimpse both a richer past and a bright...