2. When chocolate arrived in Spain in 1528, it was used as a medicine
When the drink that Hernán Cortés was served by Montezuma eventually found its way to Spain, it proved puzzling. Remember, this wasn’t the delicious, sweetened hot chocolate that we enjoy of a chilly winter’s evening today, but a bitter liquid flavored with chili peppers. The account of Jose de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit missionary in Peru and Mexico in the 16th century, gives a sense of their befuddlement: ‘loathsome to such as are not acquainted with it, having a scum or froth that is very unpleasant [to] taste… [and] yet it is a drink very much esteemed among the Indians’.
However, the Spanish colonists swore by chocolate’s medicinal properties: ‘both men and women that are accustomed to the country are very greedy of this Chocolate… which they say is good for the stomach and against the catarrh’. Back in Spain itself, this is indeed how chocolate was first used, especially as a laxative. But tiring of the bitter taste, people began adding sugar and honey to the mixture to make it more palatable, and the resultant mixture was nothing short of a revolution. The sweetened remedy was so delicious that people soon forgot about chocolate’s supposed medicinal properties altogether.