Traditional Cacao Processing
This passage is from the book Indian Givers, How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, by Jack Weatherford.
Three companions and I had an afternoon in a motorized canoe at the Mamore River near the Brazil-Bolivia border. We had gone four hours without passing a single hut since our last stop, where an Indian woman had fried us a batch of pocu fish. In the heat we had become steadily more thirsty and eventually quite hungry. Even though it was not raining that day, it was in the middle of the rainy season and the river rushed along at twice its normal size and was full of floating bushes, trees, and dead animals that together with the sediment in the water made it much too unhealthy to drink.
At long last our guide turned the canoe into a small creek and took us past an inland lake to a high embankment at the top of which was a small Indian village. Because most of the inhabitants were resting from the heat in the shade behind their huts, they did not come out to meet us. Contrary to what most outsiders think of as “the law of the jungle,” we knew that that law permitted us to help ourselves to eat any fruit on or under the trees, but forbade us to carry any away without first paying for it or to bother any part of the harvest that was being processed in some way. We immediately picked the large pods of the cacao tree, cracked them against the tree trunk, and started eating them. These pods look like slightly oblong acorn squash in size and color, and the ribbing of the shell pops open to reveal a soft white pulp of flesh which is very moist but tastes nothing like chocolate. The creamy fruit quickly slaked our thirst and curbed our appetites.
Only after we had recovered from the hot trip on the river did we visit the Indian families in the community. The village and the orchards of cacao, oranges, bananas, and plantains all flowed into one another without any barriers between the orchards, the working areas, and the residences. All of it seemed to be one organic entity. On this day, one Indian couple and their children sat behind their hut curing cacao. The Indians gathered a large pile of cacao fruit, and sitting beneath the trees they split open each pod. Because the seeds, or beans as we usually call them, are so thoroughly intertwined in the fruit of the pod, they are too slippery to remove with the fingers. Instead the members of the family ate the fruits and extracted the seeds with their teeth. They sucked the beans from the slippery fruit and then spat them out into a small pile. One of the children took the growing pile of beans out of the shade to spread them out on a high wooden bench in the sun, where they dry for several days. The bench sat high enough to keep animals away, but insects crawled over them, eating the remaining bits and pieces of fruit still attached. After several days of drying in the sun and being turned regularly to ensure even exposure, the beans were toasted in large pans over an open fire.
The Indian woman toasting the beans that day used a delicate and precise process requiring just the right temperature and just the right speed for shaking the beans. Too much heat would have burned them and ruined the chocolate, too little would have left them raw.
When the toasted beans had cooled, the man fed them into a manual grinder that rendered them into a thick but dry paste. The children then scooped the paste into balls and wrapped the balls into packets of banana leaves. The next time the family went to market, they would take the packets of cacao with them in the canoe to exchange for other foods or manufactured items. For those Indians the chocolate amounted to cash; it was too valuable a commodity for them to eat it themselves. Even the toddlers unable to talk knew to spit out the cacao seeds when eating the fruit.
Though none of these steps demanded very complicated equipment, the processing of the cacao bean still involved a sophisticated technological procedure, from the extraction of the seeds through drying, roasting, grinding, and packaging. Just finding the cacao pods wild in the woods and eating them the way my companions and I did was far removed from making chocolate. It took the Indians many centuries not only to learn to cultivate the plant but also to develop the appropriate technology for making the fruit into a very different type of product. By and large the Europeans borrowed this technology, and even though they could often improve on it with new tools for grinding and for other steps in the process, the process remained the same. Cacao beans grown today in large plantations throughout tropical South America and the English-speaking countries of western Africa go through the same steps, even though the drying and roasting may be done in large mechanized mills rather than in small Indian villages where people sit around in the shade to make the chocolate.
