Kind of bean

Usage examples of cacao.

Although there are several excellent scientific works dealing in a detailed manner with the cacao bean and its products from the various view points of the technician, there is no comprehensive modern work written for the general reader.

Until that appears, I offer this little book, which attempts to cover lightly but accurately the whole ground, including the history of cacao, its cultivation and manufacture.

It will be seen from the above that the species-name is cacao, and one can understand that Englishmen, finding it difficult to get their insular lips round this outlandish word, lazily called it cocoa.

By the single word, cacao, I imply the raw product, cacao beans, in bulk.

Had this been done, it would have been unnecessary for the manufacturers to point out that cocoa powder was not being so exported, and that they naturally did not sell the raw cacao bean.

It signifies any preparation of roasted cacao beans without abstraction of butter.

It practically always contains sugar and added cacao butter, and is generally prepared in moulded form.

But for this spelling no one would have dreamed of confusing the totally unrelated bodies, cacao and the milky coconut.

Did time and space allow, there is much to be told on the romantic side of chocolate, of its divine origin, of the bloody wars and brave exploits of the Spaniards who conquered Mexico and were the first to introduce cacao into Europe, tales almost too thrilling to be believed, of the intrigues of the Spanish Court, and of celebrities who met and sipped their chocolate in the parlours of the coffee and chocolate houses so fashionable in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

On opening a cacao pod, it is seen to be full of beans surrounded by a fruity pulp, and whilst the pulp is very pleasant to taste, the beans themselves are uninviting, so that doubtless the beans were always thrown away until .

The name of the man who discovered the use of cacao must be written in some early chapter of the history of man, but it is blurred and unreadable: all we know is that he was an inhabitant of the New World and probably of Central America.

Another people that share with the Aztecs the honour of being the first great cultivators of cacao are the Incas of Peru, that wonderful nation that knew not poverty.

The Spanish discoverers of the New World brought home to Spain quantities of cacao, which the curious tasted.

Certain it is, that when British sea-rovers like Drake and Frobisher, captured Spanish galleons on the high seas, and on searching their holds for treasure, found bags of cacao, they flung them overboard in scorn.

Mexicans consisted of a mixture of maize and cacao with hot spices like chillies, and contained no sugar.