A cold winter day’s hot chocolate is incomplete without a frothy mountain of whipped cream piled on top. It steams on a window sill while snow shows whipped-cream-white flurrying mindlessly on the other side of the window’s glass. A scene that is timeless beyond expectations, ancient in fact. Chocolate and foam have been married as a beverage for thousands of years, although the snowy associated is rather recent. After all, it started in Mexico.
Central American natives consumed chocolate very early on as a beverage, although unrecognizable as the hot and sweet one we know today. This is common knowledge, but what is more surprising is that the combination that hot chocolate and whipped cream represents, liquid chocolate capped with a foamy head, is equally as ancient. Throughout Central America and Mexico, there exist a variety of traditional drinks, primarily based on chocolate, that are whipped up into a foam as a prerequisite to drinking.
Wild ancestors of cacao trees may have come from the Amazon basin, but the chocolate we know today was domesticated in the forests of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico. It is likely that chocolate was drunk before it was eaten. Some theories point to the Honduran practice of fermenting ground cacao into a beverage over 2000 years ago as one of the first uses of chocolate. Using the pods to make beverages, humans likely realized the food potential of the crop.
While chocolate bars may be preeminent today, the drink was far more important in ancient times. Cacao pods could be used as de facto currencies because they were in such high demand. Emperors and elites enjoyed plenty of the luxurious drink as well and caches of chocolate drinking paraphernalia have been found in palaces. The drink was consumed, at least in part, for its chemical properties which stimulated the body. It was the espresso of Tenochtitlan! Cocoa contains natural alkaloids, namely theobromine, theophylline, and the well-known caffeine. All of these have stimulating effects.
Aztec and Maya baristas had their own techniques and even rituals. To make a chocolate drink, the ground cacao is added to water (there were no cows for milk in the New World) and then mixed. The drink is not nearly ready at this point, it’s missing the most important part. In pre-Columbian times, the two known methods of mixing were thrashing with sticks or pouring back and forth between two cups. Whichever was employed, it did more than just mix the drink, it also created a froth or foam. While the entire drink was consumed, the foam was the most prized portion.
These foamy drinks were as varied as cocktails are today. Most recipes called for a base of either toasted and ground cacao or ground maize. The Lacandon Mayans mixed cacao, corn, and cold water and then added a grass or vine as a foaming agent. The Chinantecs made popo with water, cacao, sugar, and chewed vines containing saponins which are both water and fat soluble and give natural root beers their foamy head. The Zapotec made bu’pù which was hot corn atole with a generous cap of cool foam frothed from cacao, sugar, and the flowers of the frangipani plant or the Rosita de Cacao. The Huichols in the deserts of Northern Mexico even frothed the powder of dried peyote cactus in water for anointing the heads of worshippers or drinking. Other versions of foamy corn and chocolate drinks were called tocanicapizoyachina, pozol, ponzonque, and tejate, the last of which could also contain sapote fruit. A wide array of ingredients with only one thing in common, foam.
Foam had spiritual meaning for many of the cultures of central Mexico. Zapotecs believed foam was hope and strength. The foam was the soul of the beverage. The Lacandon Mayans nourish their “god pots” with foamy drinks. The Aztecs even had a god of foam named Papatzac who was believed to have invented the stuff! In pre-Columbian art, alcoholic drinks are regularly represented as a cup with a foamy head on top. When Europeans arrived in the New World, they couldn’t help but notice this effervescence.
At first, Europeans may have rejected the strange world of foam that they had entered. One Spanish priest wrote of it, “a beverage that they make called chocolate, which is prized to the point of folly in that land. It is nauseating to some who are not accustomed to it, for it has froth on top and a sort of lees [dregs].” It did not take long for the Spanish to change their minds. 15th century Europe lacked the stimulants that abound today. Chocolate was an exotic import that made the bebedor feel good. As a matter of fact, chocolate arrived to the Continent before both coffee and tea were generally consumed! Chocolate was widespread in the early 1600s while coffee would not take off until the middle of the same century and tea at the end of it. Europeans learned to prize their foam just as indigenous Mesoamericans did.
The chocolate cultural exchange went both ways across the Atlantic. The greatest impact of European adoption of the drink was the invention of the molinillo (from the word molinar to grind)that all foam drinks are made with today in Mexico. This tool is a sort of wooden whisk with teeth that is held between the palms of the hand and twisted to agitate a liquid. It permanently changed how foamy drinks were made. With the tool, dry chocolate is taken and crushed with the head of the molinillo, water is added, and the thrashing of the mixture ensues. The motion is that of someone starting a fire with a stick. While earlier drinks may have used sticks as beaters, they did not have the stylized molinillo until after the conquest. Just as foaming chocolate became a staple in Spain (see your churro dip), the molinillo remains in Mexico today.
What’s the fuss about this foam? Ask any child why the whipped cream is necessary for their hot coco. Ask any barista why frothed milk is needed for a cappuccino. Ask an Irishman why his Guinness has to be poured ever so particularly. When a beverage is served with foam, it is more exquisite. Effort is involved in preparing foam for a drink, when presented to a guest it is all the more hospitable. Not only are we flattered when our bartender ostentatiously shakes a cocktail, but foam is a guarantee of freshness. No one wants a flat beer, but we can tell a freshly poured beer by looking at it. If a drink has foam, it is fresh.
Foam beverages for the Mesoamericans may have surpassed our modern ones in significance. Some beverages bubbled naturally during fermentation, a process that endowed them with divine life. Man-made foams may have mimicked nature, but still upheld the same sense of life that bubbling booze did. This is obvious today in Mexican communities where ritual foam drinks have been substituted for carbonated beverages. As long as it has some fizz, it has significance. While the whipped cream on our hot chocolate may not mean much to us, remember: what’s on top of your drink matters just as much as what’s in it.
Holguín-Salas, Alehlí, et al. “Foam production and hydrodynamic performance of a traditional Mexican molinillo (beater) in the chocolate beverage preparation process.” Food and Bioproducts Processing 93 (2015): 139-147.
Norton, Marcy. “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics.” The American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 3, [Oxford University Press, American Historical Association], 2006, pp. 660–91, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.3.660.
Rosenswig, Robert M. “Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Culture History of Cacao – Edited by Cameron L. McNeil.” Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 27, no. 3, July 2008, pp. 435–437. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.1470-9856.2008.00278_4.x.
Stross, Brian. “Food, Foam and Fermentation in Mesoamerica.” Food, Culture & Society, vol. 14, no. 4, 2011, pp. 477–501., https://doi.org/10.2752/175174411×13046092851352.
Zennie, Thomas M., and John M. Cassady. “Funebradiol, a New Pyrrole Lactone Alkaloid from Quararibea Funebris Flowers.” Journal of Natural Products, vol. 53, no. 6, 1990, pp. 1611–1614., https://doi.org/10.1021/np50072a040.
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