For most of its history, cacao was consumed not as a solid confection, but as a dynamic, culturally vital beverage. This session provides a complete overview of drinking chocolate, tracing cacao's horticultural journey and its cultural interpretation as a drink from the Upper Amazon to Mesoamerica, leading to its culinary explosion throughout the Americas and beyond in colonial times. In Mesoamerica, indigenous women mastered drinking chocolate, grinding the roasted cacao with nixtamalized corn, cacao relatives like Theobroma bicolor (pataxte), achiote, vanilla, rosita de cacao, and chiles—creating mixtures that were later fused with Old World spices to make drinks that still beckon.
Through early manuscripts and historic tools like Maya vessels, metates, gourds, molinillos, and mancerinas, we will explore cacao's material culture. In Latin America, drinking chocolate is a part of life, surviving today as nourishment and in living traditions like the Guatemalan pozunke and batido, and Tabascan pozol—an unsweetened cacao and nixtamalized corn drink consumed at all hours, and even into the afternoon when it is often sipped alongside sweets served on fresh citrus leaves.
Today, drinking chocolate offers a massive opportunity. From modern reinterpretations like "ceremonial cacao" to artisans crafting bars with rough-ground fine cacao and expertly crafted pre-flavored drinking bars, this session challenges contemporary makers to embrace this unbroken lineage and elevate hot chocolate from a nourishing drink to a celebrated ritual. The presentation concludes with a guided tasting.
