When the Spanish conquistadores arrived in Mexico they found a whole host of exciting new food-stuffs, from potatoes to avocados to vanilla. But chief among these, and arguably Mexico’s biggest claim to culinary greatness, was a little something called chocolate.


The Aztecs often made drinks using the beans of the cocoa tree, which they flavoured in a number of different ways, and the Spanish invaders were equally enamoured. They took cocoa plants back to Europe, and before long cocoa houses had sprung up across most major European cities, selling cocoa as a fashionable new drink. Eventually, a couple of centuries later, it became popular in the solid form we know now: sweetened and spiced, and formed into slabs or bars (though Guatemalan women had already been pressing chocolate powder into bars for storage for some time before this).


The chocolate itself comes via the fruit of the cocoa plant. The flesh of the fruit is removed and often eaten directly by people in cocoa-producing countries (which now include many African nations) – but it is not this sweet pulp that is used to make what we know as chocolate. Instead it is the seeds in the middle of the fruit that are used – they are very bitter when raw, and need to be first fermented, then dried, cleaned, roasted, and ground into a paste. It only takes about six seeds to make a bar of milk chocolate, but over 20 for dark chocolate.


In Mexico today, chocolate is still mainly used to make drinks, hot or cold, as well as the famous ‘moles’, which are rich stews in which bitter chocolate or plain cocoa is used. ‘Mexican chocolate’ is actually a special kind of chocolate in itself, in which the cocoa is combined with sugar, ground nuts, and cinnamon, and pressed into round discs.


While this is very popular in Mexico to this day, it’s difficult to track down in Europe unless you have a specialist supplier nearby. You can make your own at home by combining dark, bitter chocolate with a small amount of cinnamon, a few ground almonds, and a couple of tablespoons of caster sugar, blending in a food processor, and then storing in an airtight container in the fridge for two weeks.