Chile Peppers & Chocolate

The story of a 'hot' relationship...
Chile peppers were already used with chocolate (or rather cocoa) prepared in ancient Mesoamerica - probably among the Maya, certainly among the Aztec. There is even a word for that drink: chilcacahuatl.

Both peoples also valued cacao highly. In fact, highly enough that cacao beans were a form of currency.

Cacao/chocolate was prepared a bit differently from today's, of course:

• hardly sweetened (sometimes, with honey),
• flavored with various spices,
• prepared as a rather thick, bitter drink,
• foamed up by pouring from one container into another.

Different people/companies are credited with the invention of the chocolate bar (depending on which version one thinks of), but it was already a Mesoamerican preparation that cacao beans would be ground up with spices, formed, and dried. This gives something like a cacao bar, but it was neither sugared, nor even meant to be consumed like that. Rather, it was a way of pre-preparing cacao mass from which to make the usual drink.

Still, even if chocolate bars aren't quite the traditional way of consuming cacao - and the more traditional spicy hot chocolate/cocoa is being re-discovered - the combination of chile pepper and chocolate has been making a sweeping comeback. Sometimes it's a strange one, usually, a very pleasurable affair.

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