Over Christmas my wife and I went to Costa Rica for a vacation. While we were there we toured an organic farm which raised over 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables. One thing they raised was chocolate.

During the tour we got to taste the various products they have, including sugar cane and sugar cane juice. We also got to taste chocolate straight from the tree.

The fruit of a chocolate tree is shaped vaguely like a football and is about four inches long. The seeds inside the fruit are what chocolate comes from, but the seeds have to be processed before they look anything like the chocolate we know (and the processing is quite something, since the seeds have to be both fermented and roasted).

Unprocessed seeds are white, flat, about an inch round, and vaguely resemble a piece of liver in terms of consistency.  The actual seed is inside the fleshy outer coating, and is hard. Our host handed seeds around for us to taste, warning us that we should not bite the seed because the core was bitter. Sucking on the seed and gently biting it released a kind of citrus flavor that wasn’t unpleasant, but it was nothing like chocolate flavor. Again, chocolate seeds are heavily processed before they become what we know as chocolate.

And all of this reminds me of a bit of chocolate history, from Tim Richardson’s Sweets: A History of Candy.

Many years ago, when the Spanish ruled Mexico and when chocolate was extremely popular among the upper class, a bishop in southern Mexico was having a problem with chocolate. The issue was that rich church women had their maids bring them chocolate during the Mass, and this was understandably irritating the bishop. He ordered his priests to confiscate the chocolate the next time it happened, but when they did it turned into a standoff in the church with swords being drawn. The bishop died shortly afterwards, convinced that he had been poisoned by the pro-chocolate group. Was he actually poisoned? It’s impossible to know, but the story is a good indication of how passionate some people are about foods, particularly about chocolate.