Who ground the chocolate? Not a trivial question
Of all the difficult things to turn into food (and most plants and animals are difficult to turn into food), cacao beans and their processing rank way up there.
Let’s leave to one side the fermenting and cleaning and just think about the grinding of cacao. Because of the oil content, grinding cacao beans is a whole lot harder than grinding grains. In Mesoamerica the grinding of cacao was done by sheer brute force on a simple grindstone.
Yet in the sixteenth century, chocolate as a drink spread quite widely from Mesoamerica to Spain and other parts of Europe on the Atlantic side and to the Philippines on the Pacific side.
(The rest of Asia never accepted chocolate, largely still doesn’t), an interesting question in itself).
Neither the Europeans nor the Filipinos were still using a simple grindstone. They’d given it up hundreds of years earlier for the more efficient (if less flexible) rotary grindstone. Hopeless for cacao because they gum up.
So where did the simple grindstones (metates) and the grinders come from? A non-trivial question because this is one of the few culinary technologies that go from the New World to the Old World.
First, I assume the grindstones/metates went from New Spain to the Old World by ship. Making the kind of metate that is good for grinding chocolate (and shown in pictures) is a skilled job. It’s not something that any old stone mason can just knock out. And it needs a knowledge of which rock formations are good and these are not necessarily or even normally the same as those for rotary grindstones.
Second, the grinders. These poor folk had not only to do the work of grinding but hump the 30-50 lb grindstone around with them. When I bought my chocolate grindstone (a specific size and shape), the metatero and his son, neither of them weaklings, used a wheelbarrow to move it.
In Spain and southern France, according to Marcy Norton, it was usually Separdic Jews who did this, though painting also show “Moors.”
And Beatrice Misa sent me this about the Philippines.
I was talking to a friend who is also doing work with cacao and apparently, before the stone grinders were used here (the ones you turn around, for grinding rice and corn), there were metates (at least he described them to look exactly like that, but no local name was given). It was a surprise to me, because I have never seen pictures or read accounts.
There were Chinese who would walk around and provide the service to families who wanted their cacao ground. Obviously the metate was more portable. It was said that the Chinese (who were abundant in the Philippines at the time, working as cooks or street vendors, also marginalized considerably) were the best cacao grinders, and would get them very fine despite the manual nature of their work. Every family would have their own beans “timpla” or mixed the way they wanted, and then the individual tableas would be stamped with their family seal.
Both the Sephardic Jews and the Chinese must have learned how to do it from migrants from New Spain, if what normally holds in technology transfer also applies here. It almost always happens when there is someone to show you.
I wonder if we will ever find manuscripts that shed light on who taught Sephardic Jews and the Chinese in the Philippines to grind? And where they got their beans? And how all this functioned as a business? And why and how it kept going until it was mechanized two hundred and fifty years later?
Not easy, technology transfer. And meantime, I would like chocolate stamped with my personal seal.
Interesting that the Chinese in the Philippines would grind the beans — do the work — while they would probably not deign to use the stuff themselves. There seem to be many situations where persons of one culture do certain work (often culinary and usually onerous) for another culture while shaking their heads in disbelief and condescension at the silly whims of their “superior” employers.
Quite. See Beatrice’s comment as well.
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Hey Rachel! Funny you post this now, I just came from a trip up north and saw this metate in a small museum in an old house– http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b166/bvmisa/_MG_4572.jpg. No antique shop can turn one up though. I’ve interviewed one antique dealer who said it had also been called metate in the Tagalog region. It was also used to refer to the round grindstone in Iloilo, which was used to grind cacao and corn (in the Visayas, there were some areas which ate corn as their staple, either with rice or alone). It’s possible that wealthier families had their own metate, or there was metate-sharing.
The Chinese definitely learned the trade through the Spanish who were familiar with the processing. They filled in many important functions for the Spanish, for example, learning to make things like bread in “Spanish” manner. Generally, they were seen as more industrious than the “lazy natives”, and they took up work that the latter did not prefer.
The beans would have been locally grown. I imagine them to be sold even more widely in wet markets during those times. I do believe also that families bought or harvested their own cacao beans and the Chinese were called upon only to grind.
The regional fondness for cacao varies greatly in the Philippines, but remains most where there was considerably Spanish “mixing”. Today, the areas with cacao beans still sold by the kilo in the wet markets are such areas. There you can enjoy cacao poured over rice cakes and as “a coffee”. In other, more scattered places, backyard farming and rudimentary processing are done (sometimes partial and incomplete fermentation can be observed).
Fascinating. I’ll move parts of this into the main blog. And I want to follow up on the round grindstone and the bread.
Rachel, have you read this paper?
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/jsa_0037-9174_1909_num_6_1_3525
Hi Rachel,
This is really interesting.
As for France, in a recent paper Bertram Gordon traces the chocolate evolution in France writing that the Jews from Bayonne surroundings used to import their cacao from Spain (as you assumed) to later transform it into a paste. Unfortunately, Gordon does not mention any evidence for this, but he does add a photo of the earliest archival documentation found (D. Apr 6, 1670) in which Bayonne authorities were being asked for permission to buy chocolate from Spain for “persons of consideration.” [571]
Can’t wait to hear about your new findings,
–.David
Gordon, Bertrand M. “Chocolate in France: Evolution of a Luxury Product.” In Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage, edited by Louis Evan Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro, 569-582. Hoboken: Wiley, 2009.
David, Thanks for the reference to Gordon’s paper. He is a meticulous researcher and always worth reading. Are you working on chocolate? Although the Jews were clearly in the grinding business, I don’t have the impression they incorporated chocolate into their cuisine in the 16th-18th century. Do you know anything about this? Perhaps for the same reason that the people of Hawaii don’t want to touch pineapple. Grinding chocolate or working with pineapple is probably enough to turn you off the foodstuff.
I’m afraid I am not going to produce new findings as it’s not my area of research. I just bring to it my general interest in history of food, technology transfer, and grinding.
Great-looking web site by the way. Just sorry that Hebrew is way beyond my expertise.
Why am I not surprised? Based on my everyday life experience, I don’t think we can even say we have successfully incorporated chocolate into Jewish cuisine not even in the 21st century.
In “The Book of Jewish Foods” Caludia Roden does provide four recipes that include chocolate, all pastries, but if you ask people on the street whether these recipes make an integral and distinctive part of a Jewish culinary heritage, I believe you will get a negative answer. Indeed, Roden explicitly notifies that three of these recipes originate from her personal acquaintances and food memory. Many of us share similar memories vividly enough to associate them with our home cuisine – a Jewish one in general – but, in my humble opinion, these personal/familial culinary experiences have not become part of the culinary system we call Jewish cuisine. During the recent decades, few chocolate- or pseudo-chocolate-derived products (kosher of course) have acquired an “Israeli” meaning, but this is a completely different (and complicated) story and should not be confused with a cuisine. So in my view, chocolate has never been part of Jewish cuisine… at least, not yet. Who knows what our future holds?
I do work with chocolate (many believe that this ingredient makes your work a play), although now less than before. Thanks to my profession as chocolatier/pâtissier, I have discovered a real interest in gastronomy, which was enough (well, almost enough) to cross borders and experience food… this time academically.
Thanks for the compliments, :-)
–.David
That’s very interesting, isn’t it? If you just confine yourself to drinking chocolate, you have Sephardic Jews playing a huge role in its dissemination in Europe, but holding it at arm’s length from their own version of southern European cuisine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Are there other, similar examples?
This is indeed thought-provoking.
First question that comes to mind is why chocolate have not found a place in Jewish cuisine of 16th-18th century? by choice? by inaccessibility? Furthermore, finding similar examples is indeed challenging, but it is not less interesting to compare the 16th-18th centuries to our times.
Take Côte d’Ivoire for example. While this country is the world leading producers/exporter of cocoa beans – more than 40% of total world production (under political tension and child labour) – consumption is negligible. Very negligible. USDA statistics show that in 1995/96 while Belgians consumed 5.5kg of cocoa bean per capita, Ivorians consumed only… huh? 0.276kg?! Circumstances and contexts are totally different, but bottom-line is: some produce, others consume.
I don’t know Ivorian cuisine good enough to say if cocoa beans or chocolate are part of it. If not, is it by choice or by inaccessibility? Oops… does this sound familiar? It might be that globalization and market economy have not taken as very far historically.
Quite agree about producers and consumers being different. Though sometimes there is some back influence. Mexicans are now eating broccoli thanks to producing it for the American market.
But what is curious about the case of Sephardic Jewish cuisine is that they were processors not producers. May be I will blog about this.