On Chocolate

This week there is Chocolate all over my blog!

I have had “Foods America Gave the World” on my desk for six months now. It is one of Verrill’s vintage nonfiction reads – it is a classic American. For some reason I have never found another book like this, a description of the history of all foods American (see FoodsIntroIndex for the Table of contents and introduction).
I have never understood why Google, etc. had not digitized the book – they have digitized over a dozen of his other books.
He wrote “Foods . . .” in collaboration with Otis W. Barrett a trained botanist and horticulturalist who was the Agricultural Director in Puerto Rico. Barrett also wrote, so I picked up “Tropical Crops” which he penned in 1928.
I have browsed the book and after a bit I started to compare the chapters on Chocolate or cacao, or cocoa.

In 2008, Gail and I visited Central America for most of a month. Nearing the end of the trip, in Copan, Honduras, we saw our first Cocoa (chocolate) tree, complete with a pod of chocolate seeds. It is a long way from these pods to some of the chocolates we see now.
That is what the three blogged titles below explain. I apologize for the clarity of the video, it’s old, and it’s 15 minutes long, but it does a great job in explaining the chocolate process.