Going to Choco Story in Belgium made me realise that I’ve not reread this fascinating book about chocolate for quite some time! I think The True History of Chocolate was one of the first serious history books about food that I read and it definitely left an impression on me!

Broken into 8 chapters, The True History of Chocolate covers the history of chocolate from its Olmec roots to its conquest of Europe (and perhaps the world). Specifically, the chapters cover:

• The botany of the chocolate tree and some of its chemistry (Chapter 1)
• The origins of chocolate with the Olmecs in Southern Mexico (Chapter 2)
• Chocolate in the time of the Mayans and Aztecs (Chapter 3)
• Chocolate’s journey to Europe and how it adapted to European tastes (Chapters 4 and 5)
• How chocolate for Europe was made (Chapter 6)
• The rise of coffee and tea (Chapter 7)
• The industrialisation of chocolate and how it turned from a drink into a solid snack (Chapter 8)

The history is incredibly rich and detailed and my favourite chapters have to be the early ones, which deal with the Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec civilisations. The Coe’s go into detail about the history of the word “chocolate” and it’s interesting to see how that is based on common misconceptions. At the time of writing (in the early 1990s), many people thought chocolate derived from the Nahautl word “chocolatl”. But the thing is, “chocolatl” doesn’t appear in any “truly early source on the Nahautl language or on Aztec culture”! The word for the chocolate drink was actually “cacahauatl” or “cacao water” and the Coes theorise that the reason for the switch from “cacahautl” to “chocolate” is, in part, due to the fact that “caca” is a vulgar word for feces in many latin-derived languages. The whole section on the various theories of how the word was derived and/or by whom was really fascinating.

However, as fascinating as the book is, I couldn’t help but notice how research-heavy it is. Which is a good thing, but given that the Coes mention that a lot of what they are talking about depends on what was the latest research at the time, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of what was written might have been changed by new findings from Mayan and Aztec scholars. If there was an updated version of this book, I wonder what, if anything, would change.

Overall, though, I found this to be a fascinating book that taught me a lot about something I thought I knew. It’s a book that I like to return to every now and then because the subject matter itself is interesting and I enjoyed how the Coes present all the information.