Chocolate

Can you imagine any European cuisine without chocolate? It’s hard to remember that, like tobacco and turkeys, Theobroma cacao was an unknown quantity anywhere east of Mesoamerica until the conquering army sent some back to Spain. Not until the nineteenth century was chocolate industrially processed for use in cake-baking and candy-making. Before then it was generally known in Europe and England as a hot, frothy sweetened beverage made from a hardened paste of roasted ground cacao beans, nuts, and spices. A version in late eighteenth-century editions of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery has anise, cinnamon, the black pepper cousin called “long pepper,” almonds, pistachios, musk, ambergris, nutmeg, rosewater or orange-flower water, loaf sugar, and “as much achiote as will make it the color of brick.” In some ways this was still close to Aztec usage.