Title: Hot Chocolate Mayan Style
Categories: Amerind Beverages Mexican
Yield: 1 Servings

2	oz	(squares) bitter, unsugared
		Bakers' chocolate
1	c	Hot water
3	tb	Honey
	ds	Salt
3	c	Hot milk
4		Sticks cinnamon bark

When Cortez and those guys arrived in Aztec country, they were unimpressed by these little dark brown beans everyone seemed to carry around, until they learned these were money -- 100 cacao beans would buy a slave. Probably Xocatl was actually developed as a food by Mayan peoples farther south, the beans were a hot trade item, before they finally got ground up and drunk as hot chocolate. You can just make cocoa your usual way (which is perhaps by adding hot water to a pre-mixed envelope), and we can't grind the beans, but here's a bit more authentic way.

Chop the chocolate and heat it in the water until melted. Add honey, salt, and beat the hot chocolate water with a balloon wire whip as you add th warmed milk. To make it more frothy and give more food value, you can beat up an egg or two, add hot chocolate to it, then pour it into the chocolate cooking pot and continue to whip, (but this isn't authentic). Serve the hot chocolate in mugs with cinnamon-bark stick stirrers in each. Purists will tell you cinnamon is oriental, not Meso-American, which is true, but it is readily available, and the cinnamon-flavored barks (canella) which are native to Mexico and Meso-America are not readily available. The Aztecs, Mayans, and others of Meso America used those. They also sometimes put bits of peyote mushroom in it, and other spices. Sometimes it was made without honey, as a bitter drink, apparently this was how it was served in European coffee houses for about 100 years until the Dutch got wise to the fact that chocolate and sugar are the perfect taste combo, which the Native people already knew. Dutch developed the process of treating cacao bean grindings with alkalais to make cocoa powder which keeps and dissolves better and has most of the bean's fat leached out of it. Chocolate's high potassium content makes a good excuse to pig out on it. It also contains thobromines which are allegedly similar to internal brain hormones of people in love, which is supposed to explain the tradition of giving a box of chocs to a lover. In my opinion this is some biochemist's fantasy.

Paula Giese

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