The World of Caffeine

by Weinberg, Bennett Alan, Bealer, Bonnie K.

  The chief deity of the Aztec state religion was the ancient tribal god, Huitzilopochtli, now styled as a sun god and god of victory in war. He had an unquenchable appetite for human hearts. Like Frazier’s goddesses of fertility, who demanded the sacrifice of the king each year to secure the rebirth of spring, Huitzilopochtli required daily human sacrifices to ensure the rising of the sun each morning. His requirement in this regard, not an inchoate obsession with death or cruelty, was the reason behind the thousands of such sacrifices that took place each year.

  The Aztec religion offered the soldiers and aristocrats other powerful and often terrifying gods, prominent among whom was Tezcatlipoca, the “Smoking Mirror.”2 His chief rival was Quetzalcoatl, the “Feathered Serpent,” patron of the priesthood and also worshiped by the common people. The everyday lives of these ordinary Aztecs, including their crops and crafts, were protected by this benign demigod, born to a virgin and a god. He was a kindly, bearded, fair-skinned deity who hailed from the golden land beyond the sunset, and whom they took to be the purveyor of practical knowledge and the ideal of self-sacrifice. Demonstrating striking parallels with Shen Nung, Quetzalcoatl ruled as the Aztec priest-king and taught his people the use of the calendar, how to plant maize, and the art of working gold and silver, and also brought caffeine to the world in the form of the seeds of the cacao tree, which he taught the people to grow and prepare. One account of Aztec beliefs states that Quetzalcoatl, growing old, or having been tricked by another deity into drinking a poison potion that robbed him of divine strength, worried that his unsightly decrepitude would frighten his subjects. He burned his palace and buried his treasures of gold, jade, blood-stones, and rare shells. He then sailed on a raft of snakes to his homeland, where he rules in perpetuity. He promised to return in the year “One Reed,” which recurred every fifty-two years on the calendar he had taught the Aztec people to use.3

  Just as the Muslims had found in coffee a substitute for wine, the Aztecs especially prized chocolate because it gave them a substitute for their traditional native drink, octli, the fermented juice of the agave. Although, unlike the Muslims, the Aztecs were not absolutely forbidden to use alcoholic beverages, drunkenness among them was strongly disapproved. The consumption of octli was restricted to those of sufficiently mature age, which sometimes meant those old enough to have grandchildren. Public intoxication was not a misdemeanor, as it is in Western societies today, but a capital offense, the most common punishment for which was execution. Not surprisingly, the Aztecs had a large cautionary temperance literature, including many horrific tales about the evils of inebriation.4

  Because chocolate could serve as a safe alternative to octli and offered its own unique stimulating effects, it was highly esteemed by the Aztec aristocracy. They kept the drink largely to themselves, forbidding its use by commoners, including priests. However, because of caffeine’s value in the rigors of a military adventure, the Aztec nobility granted an exception for soldiers on campaign and the pochta, the hereditary class of merchant-adventurers who fought their way across Mesoamerica to bring exotic trade goods, needed to exalt the king and court, from outlying regions to the capital.

  Montezuma II Meets Cortés

  Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina, Montezuma I (1390–1464), seventh king of Mexico, expanded the Aztec empire until a loose confederation of nearly five hundred cities, including those of the Maya and Toltecs, paid tribute to his capital, Tenochtitlán. These conquered cities supplied food and raw materials for Tenochtitlán’s growing population. They also provided luxury goods, including gold, feathers, gemstones, amber, jaguar skins, and, of course, cacao, as well as an ample provision of warm bodies for sacrifice to the martial gods of their conquerors. It was Montezuma I who promulgated the law that no one who had not participated in armed conflict, not even the king’s son, could affect the trappings and enjoy the privileges of wearing cotton or feathers, smoking tobacco, eating delicacies, or drinking chocolate.5

  In Montezuma I’s time, the Aztecs were capable tenders of their indigenous crops and livestock, although wheat, barley, cattle, horses, and sheep were unknown. The land was communally cultivated and a portion of the yield paid as tax to the central government. In many ways, however, the Aztecs had not advanced beyond the Bronze Age. They had neither wheeled vehicles, nor any machines depending on rotary motion, and had not yet discovered the working of iron and steel. Such European commonplaces as glass, gunpowder, and alphabetic writing were absent from their culture.

  Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), the light-skinned, bearded Spanish conquistador, received one of the warmest welcomes in history when he disembarked in Mexico in 1519, a year that, it so happened, coincided with a recurrence of “One Reed” on the Aztec calendar, the anniversary of the time that Quetzalcoatl, the light-skinned, bearded patron deity of everyday life had promised to return from a realm beyond known lands. The Aztecs had waited expectantly for countless cycles, and the arrival of Cortés and his troops in Tenochtitlán seemed to be a fulfillment of Quetzalcoatl’s promise, and Cortés, the merciless conquistador, and Quetzalcoatl, the kindly and beneficent god, became one and the same.

  Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, Montezuma II (1466–1520), eleventh king of Mexico, grandson of Montezuma I, sat on the Aztec throne in the year Cortés arrived. If we are to believe his own accounts and those of the Spanish conquistadors, Montezuma II had a taste for luxury and the talent and resources to gratify it. His imperial banquets, examples of gastronomic artistry, were reminiscent of the feasts of the early Roman emperors, in that they began with rare birds and exotic fruits imported from the far reaches of his domain. Also as at Roman feasts, performers amused the assembled with singing and dancing. But the final course of the banquet was something that neither Cortés, nor any other European, Asian, or African, ancient or modern, had ever encountered: After ceremonially washing their hands, the respectful serving women would bring cacahuatl, a cold, thickly frothing, bitter beverage brewed from roasted cacao beans, seasoned with vanilla or spices, which they proffered in golden goblets to the king. Witnesses vary as to whether the guests and household were also so honored.6

  According to early and probably exaggerated Spanish accounts, Montezuma downed fifiy cups of chocolate daily, including many consumed each time he consorted with his concubines, for what the Spanish erroneously thought was the Aztec belief in chocolate’s aphrodisiacal powers. Some Aztecs may have added a fermented corn mash to their chocolate, giving the drink an extra kick, although it is probable that only the nobility and warriors had an opportunity to partake of it. Although they knew nothing of caffeine’s and theobromine’s physical and mental stimulating powers, the Aztecs were convinced that chocolate imparted both strength and inspiration from Quetzalcoatl, and it was chiefly owing to its pharmacological powers that cacao was highly esteemed.

  Fabulous stories, from diverse sources, proliferate surrounding Montezuma II’s chocolate consumption. There are Montezuma II’s own accounts of the splendor of his court. We also have The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1572), written in Guatemala by the eighty-year-old former comrade of Cortés who seemed to be committed to recording the literal truth, although its trustworthiness is compromised by the fact that his recollections were decades old. In addition, there survive many sycophantic, purple accounts penned by Cortés’ admirers, often obviously exaggerated. For example, one writer tells us that more than two thousand pitchers of chocolate were consumed daily in the palace.7 Others say that Montezuma, like some of the Roman emperors, sent runners to the mountains for snow, which he mixed with chocolate to create a sherbet. Legend even has it that cleaning up after Montezuma’s chocolate bouts was a difficult but rewarding job. For as he emptied each golden goblet, he tossed it out the palace window into the lake below.

  If we put aside these exaggerated chronicles, the importance of cacao at the time of the conquest remains evident in the Codex Mendoza, prepared by an Aztec artist for Antonia de Mendoza, the first Sp
anish viceroy of Mexico. One of the few surviving contemporary native documents, it celebrates cacao’s prominence, illustrating large sacks of beans among precious commodities that included cotton, honey, feathers, and gold, paid by the surrounding tribes to the Aztecs in tribute.8

  It is nearly certain that cacao seeds were the first caffeinated botanicals to reach Europe in historical times, arriving with Columbus, who, on his return from his fourth trip to the New World in 1502, presented the pods to King Ferdinand of Spain. However, the record contains no indication that the virtues of the plant were known to the Spanish even in the New World until 1528,9 when Cortés watched the preparation and shared in the consumption of the fortifying drink, cacahuatl, at the court of Montezuma II. As Cortés encountered it, chocolate was a bitter brew of crushed, roasted cacao beans, steeped in water, and thickened with corn flour, to which vanilla, spices, and honey were sometimes added. There is no evidentiary basis for the frequent claim that Cortés brought the beans to Spain for the enjoyment of the royal family. However, although he never presented the beans to his sovereign, Cortés was the first to bring news of their use. In an excited letter to King Charles V of Spain, Cortés called chocolate the “drink of the gods,” and in so doing ultimately provided the scientific names for both the species, Theobroma cacao, and for caffeine’s pharmacological cousin, theobromine, responsible for some of chocolate’s stimulating powers. Both terms are compounded from Latin roots of the same meanings. During the middle of the sixteenth century, after some unknown Spaniards crossed the Atlantic with the secrets of chocolate making, the Spanish aristocracy immediately adopted the fashion of their Aztec counterparts, and the initiation of caffeine and theobromine into the culture of Europe began. Cortés, who during his previous visits had destroyed his image as a benevolent deity by executing Montezuma and his heir and conquering and looting the Aztec empire, returned to the New World, to establish cacao plantations for Charles V in Haiti, Trinidad, and Fernando Po.

  The Origins of the Words “Cacao” and “Chocolate”

  “Cacao” and “chocolate” and their cognates are today among the most widely used non-Indo-European words in the world. Surprisingly, no one is certain exactly how or even if the roots of these words are related.

  “Cacao” derives from “kakawa,” which is thought to have originated as a word in what linguists have recently decided was the Olmec language, a member the Mixe-Zoquean family of languages, the source of many important loan words in later Mesoamerican languages. Although no texts from the period survive, scholars have inferentially assigned “kakawa” to the Olmec vocabulary of around 1000 B.C.10 Sometime between 400 B.C. and A.D. 100, the Maya, the Olmecs’ Izapan successors, presumably borrowing from this Olmec word, also began using “kakawa” to designate the domesticated cacao plant and the beans harvested from it. (“Cocoa” is simply a corrupt form of “cacao.”)

  In Guatemala, the original Mayan homeland, in the village of Rio Azul, a wellpreserved pottery jar dating from before A.D. 500 and containing cacao residues, found in 1984, bears the Mayan glyphs for “ka-ka-w(a).” This is the earliest known inscription of the root of the word “cacao.”11 The first glyph, “ka,” represents a comb or feather; the second glyph, also pronounced “ka,” represents a fish fin; and the third, “w(a),” is simply the sign for a final “w.” This late-fifth-century jar, discovered in a opulent Classic Maya tomb replete with chocolate-drinking paraphernalia, has a stirrup handle and a screw-on lock-top lid. Its stucco surface is brightly painted to resemble a jaguar, with a half-dozen hieroglyphs, including two that designate cacao.12 When this jar was submitted to the laboratories of the Hershey Company of Pennsylvania, traces of both caffeine and theobromine were identified within the lid. This Mayan jar contains the oldest caffeinated comestible residues ever discovered.

  The importance of cacao to the Indians at the time of the conquest is betrayed in the rich variety of words they used to differentiate its vegetable sources. The Spanish naturalist and physician to Phillip II, Francisco Hernandez (1530–87), was sent to Mexico to discover and catalogue plants with medicinal value. In his work on the plants of the Americas, he lists more than three thousand species and gives their native names. Hernandez mentions four cultivated varieties of the tree:13 cuauhcacahuatl, “wood cacao”; mecacahuatl, “maguey cacao”; xochicacahuatl, “flower cacao”; and tlalcacahuatl, “earth cacao.”

  As noted above, the English word “chocolate,” which designates various preparations of cacao, has an etymologically uncertain relationship to “cacao.” It derives from the Spanish usage “chocolatl,” which first appeared in the New World sometime after 1650. But no one seems to know how or why the Aztec word for chocolate, “cacahuatl,” formed by combining the Mayan “kakawa” with the word “atl,” meaning water, was replaced by “chocolatl.” Many reputable reference books derive “chocolatl” from a supposed Nahuatl word for the drink that was unrelated to “kakawa,” but recent scholarship proves this word does not actually appear in the pre-Columbian sources of the language. Others blame the coinage on Spanish squeamishness over using a word reminiscent of a cant term for excrement, especially as the root “caca” in Latin and the Romance languages is frequently found in combinations that form other words relating to defecation. All we know for certain is that, from wherever it came, “chocolatl” quickly spread, replacing the Aztec word for the drink, and became the source of the word for chocolate in most languages today

  Late Classic Maya vase (A.D. 672–830), of gray buff clay, about ten inches high and seven inches in diameter, showing a woman pouring chocolate from one vessel to another in a palace setting. This is the earliest depiction of the froth-making process that characterized native preparations of cacao. (The Art Museum, Princeton University, Museum Purchase, gift of the Hans A.Widenmann, class of 1918, and Dorothy Widenmann Foundation)

  Native Methods of Preparing Chocolate

  The earliest depiction of chocolate making appears on an eighth-century Late Classic Maya vase, now in the Princeton Art Museum. The vase shows a woman pouring chocolate from a smaller jar into a larger one, a transfer intended to bring up the foam, probably considered the most desirable part of the drink in those days as it certainly was in later Aztec times. Not much is known for certain about the Late Classic Maya recipes, but it appears that they confected a wide variety of both hot and cold drinks and “gruels, porridges, powders, and probably solid substances,”14 to which were added spices and other flavors. The only spice the Maya added to chocolate that we can identify today with certainty is the chili pepper.

  Modern scholarship suggests that the Aztec chocolate drink, which was usually taken cold, was made from beans that had been dried in the sun and fermented in their pods. The beans were then crushed, roasted in clay pots, and ground into paste in a

  concave stone called a “metate.” It is believed that vanilla and various spices and herbs were added and that maize flour was sometimes used to palliate the bitter taste. The resulting paste was shaped into small wafers or cakes which were left outside to cool and harden in the shade. When ready for use, the finished cakes were crumbled, mixed with hot water, and stirred rapidly with tortoiseshell spoons. Here is one of the earliest surviving European accounts of native methods of making chocolate from cacao beans, published in 1556 by a man idenrified only as having recently returned to Venice from an American expedition in the company of Cortés, in which he praises the fortifying power of the drink:

  These seeds which are called almonds or cacao are ground and made into powder, and other small seeds are ground, and this powder is put into certain basins… and they put water on it and mix it with a spoon. And after having mixed it very well, they change it from one basin to another, so that a foam is raised which they put in a vessel made for the purpose. And when they wish to drink it, they mix it with certain small spoons of gold or silver or wood, and drink it, and drinking it one must open one’s mouth, because being foam one must give it room to subside, and go do
wn bit by bit. This drink is the healthiest thing, and the greatest sustenance of anything you could drink in the world, because he who drinks a cup of this liquid, no matter how far he walks, can go a whole day without eating anything else.15

  Thomas Gage, in New Survey of the West Indies (1648), an important source of information about the Mayas in their post-Columbian twilight, describes the typical Indian methods of preparing and consuming the drink as he encountered them a century later:

  The manner of drinking it is diverse.... But the most ordinary way is to warme the water very hot, and then to poure out half the cup full that you mean to drink; and to put into it a tablet [hardened spoonful of chocolate paste] or two, or as much as will thicken reasonably the water, and then grinde it well with the Molinet, and when it is well ground and risen to a scumme, to fill the cup with hot water, and so drink it by sups (having sweetened it with sugar) and to eat it with a little conserve or maple bred, steeped into the chocolatte.16

  Gage assumes that the use of the moliné, or stirring rod with which the liquid was beaten to a frothy consistency, and the use of sugar were native practices. However, in light of information from other sources, we must assume that both practices had, by the middle of the seventeenth century, been widely adopted in America in imitation of early Spanish innovators. Compounding his error about the moliné, Gage adds to the etymological confusion over the origin of the word “chocolate” by providing his own factitious but widely quoted onomatopoetic account that word was born when the “choco choco choco” sound of the whipping moliné was combined with the Nahuatl word for water.

  Despite the new popularity of hot chocolate among the Maya, the old Maya custom of consuming chocolate thick and cold seems to have survived until Gage’s time, at least at religious or civic festivals. As he observed: