Was Pulp Booze the First Use of Cacao? An Intriguing Hypothesis
Beer of cacao pulp? That’s what the residues on pots in Puerto Escondido in Honduras suggested to John S. Henderson and Rosemary A. Joyce of Cornell and the University of California, Berkeley respectively.
They reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that people there were fermenting the pulp about 1100 BC. If you look at a cacao pod, it has a tough exterior a bit bigger and more pointy than, say, the skin of an avocado, with a white pulp inside in which the cacao beans nestle. They’re about the size and shape of a broad bean or fava bean.
They think their hypothesis is supported by the fact that the vessels have narrow spouts. They could not have been used to make foam on a ground cacao bean mixture. (This one I’m going to have to think about a bit).
But then could beans have been tasty leftovers ground to add flavor to toasted ground maize (as in my taxcalate post) just as achiote seeds are now ground to add color?
I may have grindstones on the mind but I don’t think I’m wrong that in Mesoamerica and elsewhere everything that could be ground was to see what happened.
Thanks to Ruth Alegria for this reference to an article in the November 13th New York Times.
