Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics

Extract

When the Spanish and Portuguese arrived in the Americas, the inhabitants there made a cacao liquor which was diluted in hot water seasoned with pepper and other spices … all these ingredients gave this mixture a brutish quality and a very savage taste … The Spanish, more industrious than the Savages, procured to correct the bad flavor of this liquor, adding to this cacao paste different fragrances of the East and many spices of this country [Spain]. Of all these ingredients we have maintained only the sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon.1

Written at the end of the eighteenth century, this account of the European assimilation of chocolate is one of the earliest versions of the myth that suffuses modern scholarship: the notion that because Spaniards found the Indian form of chocolate unappetizing, they “procured to correct the bad flavor” by eliminating strange New World spices and adding sugar. Contrary to popular and scholarly opinion, the reason for chocolate's success with Europeans was not that they could insert it into existing flavor complexes and discursive categories, masking indigenous flavors with sugar and Mesoamerican symbolism with medical excuses. The Spanish did not alter chocolate to fit the predilections of their palate. Instead, Europeans unwittingly developed a taste for Indian chocolate, and they sought to re-create the indigenous chocolate experience in America and in Europe. Europeans in the New World and then the Old World somatized native aesthetic values. The migration of the chocolate habit led to the cross-cultural transmission of tastes (an appetite for spices such as vanilla and pepper, the color red, and a foamy froth). Over time, the composition of chocolate did evolve, but this was a gradual process of change linked to the technological and economic challenges posed by long-distance trade rather than a radical rupture in the aesthetic preferences of chocolate consumers.2