Older than Cadbury, and long
before Hershey was ever around the name in chocolate was Montezuma the
16th century leader of the Aztec empire, and today we are recreating
his beloved chocolate drink. Aztec chocolate, this time on Tasting History. So a word about that name Montezuma. That was not his name, or at least
that's not how he would have said it. It would have sounded more like Moteuchzuma,
or Moteuchzumazin because the name Motezuma is actually a phonetic spelling of the
ruler's name that a Spanish writer put down. There are about a dozen spellings of the name
and none of them are particularly correct, but for simplicity's sake we're
going to stick with Montezuma today. Also a huge thank you to Marcos
Patchett who helped me with a lot of the process and research for today's drink. He is the author of 'The Secret Life of
Chocolate', basically the chocolate Bible, and I will put a link in the
description to where you can get that. It is everything you could possibly
want to know about chocolate. Now there is no true recipe for what
Montezuma or the Aztecs were drinking around the time of the conquest but there are lots
of writings from the time period that describe the process of making it, and describe many of
the ingredients that would have been added. So with the help of those sources
we can kind of recreate one of the possible variations
that Montezuma would have drank. To start we look at Bernardino de Sahagún's 'The General History of the Things of
New Spain' (The Florentine Codex) which says "The seller of fine chocolate... she
grinds cacao; she crushes them. She separates them. She soaks them. She adds water sparingly...
pouring it back and forth, aerates it; she makes it form a head of foam." So that's a bit of the process but then he also
talks about different varieties of the drink. "Green, made of tender cacao;
honeyed chocolate made with ground dried flowers- with green vanilla pods; bright red chocolate;
orange-colored chocolate, rose-colored chocolate; black chocolate, white chocolate". So clearly the Aztecs had many
ways of preparing this drink. One thing we do know is that they tended to
drink it cold or probably room temperature. The Mayans would have drank hot chocolate.
The Aztecs drank room temperature chocolate, and I'm going to take two of the ingredients
that Sahagún mentions which are the vanilla and honey because those are delicious,
and then I'm also going to add in chili because many of the contemporary writings
talk about chili being added to the chocolate, but the one that I was most
intrigued by was the red chocolate. What possibly could have made it red? Well in 1528 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo
Evaldés gives us an idea of what it might be "because the people are fond
of drinking human blood, to make this beverage seem like blood, they
add a little achiote so that it turns red and part of that foam is left on the lips and around
the mouth and when it is red for having achiote, it seems a horrific thing because
it seems like blood itself." So we'll throw some achiote in there as well. Now his reasoning for why they drank it because
it looked like blood and they like to drink blood we kind of have to take with a grain
of salt. One, all the Spanish writers especially at this time had an agenda,
so everything has to be taken in context. Also one of his contemporaries
Bartolomé de las Casas said Oviedo is "one of the greatest tyrants,
thieves, and destroyers of the Indies, whose Historia contains
almost as many lies as pages". And that might be Tastorians
is why history is hard, because people just made stuff up, and it's hard
sometimes to sort the fact from the fiction. Anyway for this recipe what you'll need is: one pound or 450 grams of cacao beans.
That's kind of a cool word, cacao. Two vanilla pods. Two tablespoons of honey or
more if you want it sweeter. Two tablespoons of achiote powder.
This is called annatto in English. It's the same thing, just make sure that you're
getting the powder instead of the paste because the paste has other things in it, and instead
of turning things red it turns things yellow. And one teaspoon of cayenne pepper. You
can use pretty much any hot pepper that you want. I'm using cayenne because they had
that at the time and I had that in my pantry. So first we have to toast our cacao beans.
I'm going to use the oven though you can also do them in a skillet on the stove, or best
is probably like a coffee roaster but who has one of those on hand. So set your oven to
300 degrees Fahrenheit or 149 degrees Celsius and spread your cacao beans in a single layer
on a cookie sheet. Then roast them for five minutes before dropping the temperature to 275
degrees Fahrenheit or 135 Celsius for 15 minutes. Then drop the temperature again to 265 degrees Fahrenheit/130 celsius for
another 10 to 15 minutes. So once they're roasted we have to remove the
shell from the bean in a process called winnowing, and it is a pain in the tuchus. Jose and I did it for about two and a half hours
the other night and made quite the mess on the floor because the shells are extremely thin and
just kind of flake off, but the bean themselves will break up, and they'll get all mixed in
and it's kind of a pain to separate them, but yeah. Anyway what you end up with are cocoa
nibs. You can actually just buy cocoa nibs and it's a lot easier but once you have your
nibs all set then it's time to grind them. An even more laborious task that was usually
done on a metate but I'm using a food processor. I did do an initial crushing
with a mortar and pestle just so that the food processor had less work to
do because it takes a long time to get these into a liquid state, and that's actually what you're
going for. So I had to turn on the food processor, run it for a few minutes, turn it off, let
it cool down, turn it back on a few minutes, turn it off, and let it cool down. It was
a process, but eventually you should get to a liquid called cacao liquor, but before we
use that cacao liquor make sure to hit that Like button as we take a look at why the Aztecs
thought this chocolate was just so darn special. Now while most writings about chocolate
don't appear until the early 16th century we know that the Olmecs were cultivating this food
of the gods in Mesoamerica as far back as at least 1000 BC, and when I say food of the gods I
don't just mean because I love it so much I could start a religion around it, I
actually mean that the first part of the scientific name for the tree Theobroma
Cacao means the fruit of the gods in Greek, and according to the Popul
Vuh, or the Mayan creation myth it was one of the very first foods gifted
to humans from the god Hun Hunahpu. This cacao as they called it was so precious
that only the elite were allowed to drink it. One 16th century source saying, "The common
people and the poor did not drink it... If a commoner drank it it
was considered scandalous." And yet I am a commoner and I
intend to drink it. Escandalo. Also the beans themselves were so
cherished that at Mayan weddings they would exchange five cacao beans
instead of rings when exchanging their vows, and frankly it seems a lot more practical
than a band of gold though just as expensive. See the Mayans and the Aztecs
use these beans as currency and just like they were silver dollars upon
seeing an Aztec drop some beans on the ground a Conquistador said, "They got on their hands and
knees to pick them up as if an eye had fallen." I mean I'll cross the freeway to
pick up a penny so I totally get it, and to get an idea of what these beans were
actually worth in 1545 market prices were set at A good turkey hen is worth 100 full
cacao beans or 120 shrunken cacao beans. A small rabbit is worth 30. A chicken
egg comes at the price of 2 cacao beans. A large tomato at 1 cacao bean. A
tamale is sold for 1 cacao bean. And who says money doesn't grow on trees? I mean honestly it makes just as much
sense to use cacao beans as it does to use silver for coins, and surely they're
a lot harder to counterfeit right? "The bad cacao seller,... the
deluder counterfeits cacao... with amaranth dough, wax, avocado pits [broken into pieces which are
then shaped like cacao beans]. He counterfeits cacao; he covers
this over with cacao bean hulls; he places this in the cacao
bean shells... he throws them in with wild cacao beans to deceive
the people." I just said cacao a lot. "Cacao to cacao." Though it totally makes sense that the
common people wouldn't be drinking cacao if it's also their rent money. Though even if you did want to drink
cacao you might not be allowed to. The Dominican Friar Diego Duran talked about sumptuary laws that had been
put in place that dictated, "He who does not go to war, be he the son of a
king, may not wear cotton feathers or flowers, nor may he smoke or drink cacao." It was a drink for the rich and the military, and it makes sense that soldiers would need
it because in the words of Hernan Cortes, "The divine drink builds up
resistance and fights fatigue. A cup of this precious drink permits
man to walk for a full day without food." I mean I'd take chocolate over hard
tack any day so I totally get it. Now Cortes was possibly the very first European to
actually taste this Aztec version of chocolate, and that would have been in 1519 shortly
after meeting Montezuma. What's cool is that we actually know a lot about Montezuma, and
how he was drinking this chocolate. "After the hot dishes had been removed, every kind of fruit
which the country produced was set on the table; of which, however Montezuma ate very little every
now, and then a gold vessel was handed to him filled with a kind of liquor made from the
cacao, which is meant for success with women... I saw about 50 large pitchers filled with
the same liquor brought in all frothy. This beverage was also presented to the monarch
by women, but all with profoundest veneration... After the Great Montezuma had dined, dinner
was served to the men of the Guard and the other household officers, and I have often
counted, on the table, over a thousand dishes... These were followed by over two
thousand frothing jugs of cacao drink." Now while Diaz says that the
vessel was actually gold, other writers from the time
say that they were calabash gourds that were treated as if
they were gold, so who knows. Now judging by the sheer quantity of chocolate
that they were drinking you'd think that everybody in the world would absolutely love this drink but
it seems to have been a rather acquired taste. The Jesuit missionary José de Acosta said
"It disgusts those who are not used to it, for it has a foam on top
or a scum-like bubbling..." But even the most ardent opponent
of chocolate could be won over. "They drink it though it seems
more suited for pigs than for men. I was upwards of a year in that country without
ever being induced to taste this beverage and when I passed through a tribe, if an
Indian wished occasionally to give me some, he was very much surprised to see me refuse it, and went away laughing. But subsequently, wine
failing, and unwilling to drink nothing but water, I did as others did. The
flavor is somewhat bitter, but it satisfies and refreshes
the body without intoxicating: the Indians esteem it above everything." And the Spanish used that native esteem
for chocolate to their advantage. It's often said that many of the early
missionaries would coax natives to come to their churches with chocolate.
Though that may have backfired. See there was a story written
by the Dominican Friar Thomas Gage in the 1630s about the Bishop of Chiapas. See the women of the church had become
accustomed to drinking chocolate during mass and the Bishop did not like that. He found it
disruptive and told them that they could not drink it any longer on pain of excommunication.
Seems a little harsh. But instead of giving up chocolate the women just
gave up church. They stopped going for a month. During which time the Bishop died
supposedly poisoned by a cup of chocolate, "And it became afterwards
a proverb in that country: beware the chocolate of Chiapa." More like beware the women
of Chiapa, I would think. Tthough Thomas Gage very likely embellished
the story so who knows what actually happened. Now there's one last story of Aztec chocolate that
I want to share with you, and that is about the specific chocolate drink known as itzpacalatl.
Now a reminder that Spanish sources from this time often had hidden agendas, or not so hidden
agendas, and so everything has to be kind of taken with a grain of salt, but there are a lot of
sources that agree on most of what this drink was. So every year there was a ritual where either
a slave or sometimes a captured warrior was dressed up as the god
Tezcatlipoca and this man, "was to have no blemish; none whatsoever...
he was to be free of all imperfections." And for 40 days he would go around the city singing and dancing and being
treated and fed like a god, except at night when they locked him up in a cage
because everybody knew what was about to happen. See nine days before the actual ceremony
the elders came to him and said, "O Lord, let your worship
know that nine days from now your task of singing and dancing will end. Know that you are to die." And he was supposed to be like yes I
am so on board with this plan. This sounds fantastic you guys. But turns out not everyone was willing to play
ball, and that's where the chocolate came in. For "...if they saw that he became melancholy, that he stopped dancing joyously...
with the gaiety they desired, they prepared a loathsome spell for him. They
went immediately to procure sacrificial knives, washed off the human blood adhering to
them (the result of past sacrifices), and with that filthy water prepared a gourd
of chocolate giving it to him to drink.... He became almost unconscious and
forgot what he had been told. Then he returned to his
usual cheerfulness and dance. This drink was called itzpacalatl, which means
'water from the washing of the obsidian blades.' " So yeah... I am definitely glad that I
went with the honey and vanilla route instead of the human blood route. Definitely one of my better choices. So once your chocolate is ground into a
liquid, add the achiote and the cayenne, and the honey. You should also scrape the vanilla
seeds in at this point but I forgot, but luckily if you do forget you
can just scrape them in later. Then give it another mix so that
everything is well incorporated. Then put the chocolate into a pitcher
and slowly add boiling water. Now we know that they drank the
chocolate at room temperature, but I tried it with room temperature
water and it just didn't mix. Maybe they had a way of doing it, I don't know. It just turned into like a
grimy muck at the bottom of the pitcher, so I used boiling water and then let it
cool down, and it worked like a charm. Also the foam on Aztec chocolate was famous. It
is often depicted as just flowing over the top and I'm not able to do that. First of all it's thought that they had
several different foaming agents, and I don't have access to any of those agents so I'm
not going to get that kind of foam. Then one of the ways that they made this foam was by pouring
it from pitcher to pitcher at a great height. Kind of tried that, makes a huge mess
and frankly it didn't really work. Again, maybe they had a wonderful technique
that just has been lost to time but instead I'm using what is called a molinillo and these were actually supposedly invented by
the Spanish in Mexico just after the conquest, but there are records of there being
chocolate beaters that the Aztecs had that they would beat their chocolate in pitchers. So I'm guessing that they just changed
the name and took credit for inventing it. So mix your chocolate drink with the
molinillo until you do get some foam and then pour yourself a cup and enjoy. And here we are Montezuma's chocolate. So maybe they used calabash
but someone had said gold, so I went with the fancy gold, though
my foam very, very quickly dissipated. It just is what it is, but let's give it a drink. It is actually very foamy. It's bitter but it's not- Hm. Hm! Okay. There's that cayenne. x_x Boom took me a second. Aha, ha ha... Yeah that's a little spicy you could probably add a little bit less. It's not
overwhelming though. It's- And now I'm getting all the other
flavors. The vanilla is in there, and not really the honey. It's not as
bitter as I thought it would be. Though Jose tried it and he was just
like "could we add some sugar?" Though they didn't add sugar for a
few decades, and that was in Europe. One of the very first recipes is by
Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma in his work 'Chocolate or an Indian drink' and
it touts a lot of the health benefits of chocolate as well as saying it was an
aphrodisiac and made women more fertile, but my favorite part of
the work is actually a poem from the English version which says, "Doctors lay by your irksome books And all ye pettifogging rookes Leave quacking; and enucleate
the virtues of our chocolate." I just like the term pettifogging along with bedight. I think that it should
make a comeback in our lexicon. Anyway, whether Aztec chocolate or
modern day chocolate [or choccy milk!], I do encourage you to try yourself a glass of
chocolate drink or milk sometime very soon, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
