When European explorers got hold of the drink in the seventeenth century, they exported it to coffee houses, where it competed with tea and coffee to be the beverage of choice of Europeans—and lost. What no one had really mentioned was that chocolatl means “bitter water,” and even though it was sweetened with the new cheap sugar flooding in from the slave-run plantations of Africa and South America, it was also a gritty, oily, and heavy drink, because 50 percent of the cocoa bean is cocoa fat. This is how it remained for another two hundred years: an exotic drink, notable but not terribly
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