How Europe learned to drink chocolate

The received account has Spaniards recoiling from a bitter, chilli-laced drink and rendering it acceptable by adding sugar. It is a satisfying story with a European inventor at the centre, and the scholarship does not support it.

What the record shows is slower and more interesting. Chocolate was adopted first in the Americas, by Spaniards living in Mesoamerica among people who drank it daily — colonists, clergy, administrators and their households, many of them in mixed households with Mesoamerican women who prepared it. Taste was transmitted the way tastes usually are, by prolonged exposure rather than by redesign. What crossed the Atlantic was already a habit, and it crossed with the equipment, the vocabulary and the technique.

The changes that followed were substitutions rather than corrections. Sweetening increased, though sweetened cacao preparations were not unknown in Mesoamerica; chilli gave way in many recipes to cinnamon, black pepper, aniseed and other spices available through European trade; and vanilla — itself Mesoamerican — travelled with it. Serving vessels changed, and the frothing technique persisted.

The distinction matters beyond accuracy. 'Europeans made it palatable' frames three thousand years of development as raw material awaiting improvement, which is the same move that makes the plantation economy sound like efficiency.