Cocoa
Cocoa This plant gets its name from a word of origin proto Amerindian pronounced "kakawa". The first farmers began cultivating the plant were the Maya around one thousand BC The scientific term "Theobroma cacao" (food of the gods), was given by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. for the many properties attributed to cocoa the peoples of Central America. The seeds were a symbol of prosperity in religious rites; a medicine that can cure the disease of the mind and body (rashes, diarrhea or stomach pain); the basis of the monetary system. A seed of cocoa was worth the equivalent of four ears of corn, three seeds were used to buy a pumpkin or a turkey egg, and with a hundred you could get hold of a canoe or a coat in cotton. In the aspect food cocoa it was essential ingredients for different beverages, classified according to the quality of seeds and associated products. Famous was the "Pasol", cocoa combined with corn, which packed in the form of balls became food invigorating easy to transport, to be eaten after soaking in hot water. The historic Milanese Benzoni in his "History of the New World" (1565) thus presents the cocoa and the mixture derived from it: "its fruit is a way of almonds, and born in some pumpkins in thickness and width almost like a watermelon ... put it in the sun to be dried, and when they want it bevere, in a text-dry the fire, and then with stones ... the grind, and put him in his cups ... gradually distemperatolo with water, and sometimes with a little of its pepper, beono, which seems more beveraggio from swine from huomini ". You can not establish with certainty the moment the cocoa would have landed in Europe. Many books have given to Cortés about this, but there would be no documentary evidence of this hypothesis. The first written official apparition of cocoa in the Old World, comes from the report of the visit of a delegation of Dominican friars, returned from Verapaz after an attempted subjugation of the natives. It was 1544 when the religious led a delegation of noble Maya visiting Philip of Spain; it seems that the guests, dressed in the traditional clothing of their country, the prince offered many gifts including a dark beverage, pasty, called "xocoatl", coming from the seeds of the cacao. Regardless of who he introduced the cocoa in Europe, we must remember that during the '500 Spain and the territories of the New World were in constant contact, and the passage of the seeds could be carried out through the lines of communication between the monasteries of Central America and the their parent companies in Spain. In any case, the transatlantic trade cocoa began only in 1585, when the first shipment of beans reached Seville from Veracruz.
