Chocolate in Europe

Hernán Cortés can take the credit for successfully taking cocoa to Europe. He could see its importance as a cash crop, for in Mexico the cocoa bean had a monetary value, and was used in the place of small coins. Cortés had been searching for the gold of El Dorado, but he quickly realized that cocoa was a renewable source of ‘money’. He took the beans and planted them in Haiti, Trinidad and, it is believed, on the island of São Tomé, from there they were taken to the Ivory Coast, where much of the world’s ‘bulk’ cocoa is grown. It was Cortés, too, who adapted the Aztec recipe for preparing chocolate gruel, so that the cold, fatty and spicy drink, which some chroniclers called ‘a wash fitter for hogs’, became a hot drink, with the addition of sugar, vanilla and cinnamon, that appealed so much to the European palate.