The true (and untrue) history of the "Food of the Gods"

Abstract

The True History o f Chocolate written by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, two American anthropologists, is an interesting piece of scholarship about Mesoamerican culture before and after the Spanish conquest and a story of cacao seeds, chocolate manufacturing process and the ways and rituals of serving chocolate drinks. The book can be also contemplated for its intriguing metaphors which create a feast in itself and transport us to a forgotten and magic world of the Maya and the Aztecs, the first planters of the “food of the gods.” The European countries were conquered by chocolate in the sixteenth century, but in England it is not until the seventeenth century that we find Samuel Pepys’s diary entries about his indulgence in chocolate drinking. There are numerous references to chocolate in literature from the Age of Reason to the twentieth century, but there are two novels which seem to best illustrate man’s interest in the culinary qualities of the food of the gods: Laura Esquivels’s book of stories written in a form of recipes and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat. The latter novel is a luscious morsel of a book breaking into confectionary prose, which evokes the smells and textures of the chocolate shop and the chocolate war between the church and the inhabitants of a small French town before the Festival of Chocolate.