yomexicoNEWS

Spilling the cacao beans on Mexico's hot drink

By Laurence Iliff
The Dallas Morning News

MEXICO CITY — Of Mexico's many gifts to the world, such as avocados and tequila, few have the universal appeal of a piping cup of hot chocolate and its magical links to Mayan rituals and Aztec emperors.

In Mexico, hot chocolate is used not just to celebrate holidays or accompany tamales on Sundays. It can be found almost anywhere one finds coffee or tea.

There are even mobile chocolate (choh-coh-LAH-teh) vendors, who mix chocolate powder with hot water on the streets of the capital, in the subway, in parks. But there also are special places in Mexico where hot chocolate is particularly savored, places that serve as reminders to the hot drink's roots in pre-Colombian southern Mexico, or where it is accompanied with traditional foods that make its appeal all the more special.

Evelio Arias, owner of La Chocolateria Mama Sarita in Mexico City's bohemian Condesa neighborhood, offers more than just a cup of hot chocolate. In fact, he offers 80 different possibilities, plus those you are free to invent on your own.

One not on the menu: hot chocolate with a couple of red, comapa chilies. Arias is afraid to put it on the menu, he says only half-jokingly, because of its powerful, intoxicating effects.

"Cacao, our history tells us," says Arias, "is Mexico's gift to the world."

Originally found in southern Mexico's Mayan region, cacao was brought by the conquering Aztecs to what is now Mexico City, then the seat of their empire. Cacao beans were used as currency by some Indian groups. The conquering Spanish delivered cacao to Europe and the world.

In Tabasco, Arias says, farmers also use cacao to make a corn-based drink called chorote that staves off hunger.

With his concoctions, Arias offers a journey through the taste buds to the birth of hot chocolate and its evolution throughout the centuries.

Arias has his own Tabasco cacao plantation. Most of the production goes to a big chocolate company. But for his business, he oversees the processing of the cacao fruit, which is grown on trees in the shade.

Mama Sarita may be the only business on the globe that sells the original hot chocolate drink favored by indigenous people in Arias' hometown of Macuspana, Tabasco. The Aztec emperor Montezuma reportedly was an addict.

The original drink had neither sugar nor milk, but rather was bitter cacao in boiling water with a touch of honey from the maguey cactus. To the untrained palate, Arias' hot chocolate is a heartier, headier drink with a noticeable stimulant effect — caffeinelike.

"In Tabasco, making hot chocolate is like making tortillas," says Arias, 38. "One of the traditions is that you drink it every afternoon and every evening. My great-grandmother said that to make good hot chocolate you have to be in a good mood."

When Arias moved from Tabasco to Mexico City seven years ago, his hot chocolate addiction went unsatisfied. "I did not like the quality of the chocolate here. It was too sweet, too commercial," he says.

And so, Arias imported the raw materials from Tabasco and made chocolate for himself and his friends and soon expanded into his small business.

"The traditions that die are the ones that are not open to change," says Arias. "The ones that will survive are the ones that can change without losing their essence."

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company