Who drank chocolate first, and how did the Maya make it?

The first chocolate was not sweet, solid or even quite chocolate. It was a bitter, frothy drink, and some of the oldest evidence for it comes from Mesoamerica. On the Pacific coast of Chiapas, the Mokayan people were drinking bitter, frothy, watery cacao drinks by 1900 BC, and evidence from the Gulf Coast of Veracruz shows that pre-Olmec peoples prepared cacao by 1750 BC. Historians admit they cannot say exactly when a true chocolate drink began, because the Olmecs also fermented the sweet pulp around the seeds into an alcoholic drink.

How do we know? Partly from pots. Archaeologists found traces of theobromine and caffeine in ancient vessels, and since cacao is the only known Mesoamerican commodity containing both, the vessels very likely held cacao drinks. On one vessel from the Maya site of Rio Azul, a hieroglyphic text even names cacao.

The Maya, whose chocolate drinking dates back to at least 600 BC, gave us the clearest recipe. They fermented, dried and roasted the beans, removed the husks and pounded the nibs on a stone metate over a fire until they became a paste. The paste was flavoured with additions such as vanilla and earflower, then mixed with water. Before serving, the cook poured the chocolate from a height between vessels to raise a highly sought-after brown foam. Connoisseurs judged a cup by the darkness of its foam, the colour of its bubbles and its aroma.

For the Maya chocolate was serious. It appeared at ceremonies, feasts, weddings and funerals, and was used as medicine. According to one scholar, Grivetti, only adult men drank it, though nobody knows how, or if, commoners did. The Maya later introduced it to the Aztecs, and in Oaxaca people still drink traditional cacao drinks such as tejate today.