Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Pure Chocolate – Food of the gods

Rich, decadent and addictive, chocolate has got to be one of the most delicious and seductive food on earth. Even if you don’t want another reason to indulge in its dark sweetness, a trip to “Chocolate: the Exhibition” will give you one and many more.
You will learn that chocolate is called the food of the gods because the plant’s botanical name, Theobroma cacao, literally means “food of the gods.But you can credit the Aztecs for inspiring chocolate’s stature to that point. Between the 13th and 16th centuries, they valued the cacao seeds like money. To them, chocolate was a luxury, a drink for warriors and nobility, used in ritual and ceremonies. You could buy tamale for just one cacao seed. So it looks like gold was not the great discovery in 1512 by Cortez, the Spanish Conquistador. It was a chocolate.

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