and roasting. Its consistency is like no other
food’s: hard and dry at room temperature,
melting and creamy in the warmth of the
mouth. It can be sculpted into almost any
shape, and its surface can be made as glossy
as glass. And chocolate is one of the few
examples of a food whose full potential was
first revealed in industrial manufacturing. The
chocolate that we know and love, a dense,
smooth, sweet solid, has existed for only a
tiny fraction of chocolate’s full history.
The History of Chocolate
An Exotic Drink The story of chocolate
begins in the New World with the cacao tree,
which probably evolved in the river valleys of
equatorial South America. The tree bears
large, tough seed pods that also contain a
sweet, moist pulp, and early peoples may have
carried the pods into Central America and
southern Mexico as a portable source of