The History of Chocolate begins in Latin America, where cacao trees grow in the wild. The first people to use chocolate were probably the Olmec of what is today southeast Mexico. They lived in the area around 1000 BC, and their word,”kakawa,” gave us our word “cacao.” However, that is all we know and we don’t know if the Olmec actually used chocolate. The Maya, who inhabited the same general area a thousand years later (from about 250-900 AD), did use chocolate. At one point cacao beans were used as currency and of course, someone found a way to counterfeit them by duplicating them in clay. Sweetening of chocolate was due to the Europeans who added sugar and milk after cocoa was discovered in the Americas and brought it back to Europe. In Mexican cookery chocolate is used in savory dishes such as enchiladas and especially mole.
Cacao refers to the plant or its beans before processing, while chocolate refers to anything made from the beans and cocoa generally refers to chocolate in a powdered form.
The link below may be of interest:
Vanilla a Commonplace Kitchen Ingredient Becomes an Exotic Elixir
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