Drinking Hot Chocolate

The season for hot beverages is approaching here in Michigan. Thus I'm thinking of a winter favorite drink: hot chocolate. As you can see in the photo, I make it with Hershey’s cocoa, sugar, vanilla, and of course marshmallows. Even on this not-so-cold fall day we enjoyed it.

Before chocolate technology advanced to making various types of candy, cocoa beans were used exclusively for making a beverage, along with various other flavors. Many books and articles document the very complicated history of chocolate, first in its original territory, Mesoamerica, and later during its introduction to Europe in the 16th century. Chocolate enjoyed great popularity in Europe in the 18th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries, new food technologies led to the transformation of chocolate into a sweet food. The roughly pulverized cocoa nibs could thus be ground into fine powder for cocoa or made into smooth, tempered candy or chocolate tablet for cooking and baking.

In this brief post, I'm just going to talk briefly about two of the eras of chocolate drinking -- the pre-Columbian era in Mesoamerica, and the chocolate-loving 18th century in Europe. For this, my post simply shows some of the vessels for preparing and serving hot chocolate.

Chocolate Drinks for the Privileged Aztecs and Mayas

Chocolate drinks were prepared in Mexico and Central America before the European conquest: cocoa beans were so valuable that only the ruling class ever tasted it. In fact, cocoa beans were sometimes used as money, and there are examples of counterfeits -- fake beans made out of clay!

An Aztec woman pouring chocolate into
a chocolate pot in order to make it foam.

The Mayans and the Aztecs had ceremonies in which the hot chocolate was prepared for the king, using several traditionally-shaped and decorated vessels, often including depictions of chocolate pods. Besides the pulverized chocolate beans, which had been ground on a stone metate, the Aztec chocolate drink included corn flour and hot chili pepper, and was foamed in the way illustrated above or with a special wooden tool for stirring the mixture.

Here, from the book Chocolate, Pathway to the Gods, are some images of chocolate pots used by the ancient Mayas, inventors of chocolate:

A chocolate pot from the Classic Maya era,
from Copan, Honduras. (p. 116)

Maya vase showing a monkey holding a cacao pod. (p. 160)

Four Maya ceramic chocolate containers. The one at upper right has a glyph that means "frothy cacao."
The deer at lower left was an effigy that contained traces of chocolate. (p. 129)

Pre-classic Maya vessel containing traces of chocolate (p. 114)

Pods of cocoa beans on a tree in the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Ann Arbor.
They grow directly on the branch or tree trunk. The plant grows only in
some tropical climates: this is in a greenhouse.

Preparing Hot Chocolate in 18th Century Europe

Skipping forward a number of centuries, chocolate had become a much-enjoyed drink of the upper classes in Europe in the 17th and 18th century. The preparation and even the ingredients were not very different from those used by the Mayans and Aztecs, though European chocolate-drinkers soon began to add sugar and vanilla (which is also a New World product). English, French, Spanish, and German ceramicists and silver smiths made a variety of chocolate pots and chocolate cups to indulge the chocolate drinkers of their time. A few examples:

Wedgewood chocolate serving set, England, 18th century. 

Silver chocolate pot with a wooden handle.

Silver chocolate pot with a specialized frother.
The handle would turn opposite the way one
poured with it, to avoid becoming loose.
The frother resembles those used by the Aztecs.

Sources for these images: Smithsonian magazine, the Ashmolean Museum, the Jane Austen Society.

Reading About Chocolate

Chocolate: Pathway to the Gods by
Meredith L. Dreiss & Sharon Edgar Greenhill

The True History of Chocolate by
Sophie Coe and Michael D. Coe

This post is my contribution to the blogging event that takes place each Tuesday at the blog of Elizabeth and Bluebeard, where bloggers share images on the theme of beverages. My main information sources for this post are the two books above and "A Brief History of the Chocolate Pot" by Jess Righthand. This blog post © 2020 by mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.