Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (77 page)

County Auditor Larry Kaczala explained that the foreclosure and auction went according to standard procedure—without anyone from the county ever stepping foot on the premises. “The government would have no right to go onto that property,” he explained, “because we don’t own it. We just sell it for the back taxes.”

“I always wondered what happened to that dude,” a neighbor told reporters. “It got awful quiet over there.”

In September 2001, the city of Calcutta, India, announced that it would begin playing calming classical music in each of the city’s 17 subway stations “to discourage passengers from trying to commit suicide.” Since 1984 fifty-nine passengers have tried to kill themselves by jumping onto the tracks in front of trains; twentysix of the attempts succeeded. The campaign also includes posters with slogans like “I don’t like to die in this beautiful world.”

“Hopefully, people contemplating suicide will listen to our music and see our posters and get diverted from killing themselves at the stations,” says subway system spokesman S. C. Banerjee.

Northern southpaws: Polar bears are left-handed.

THE

EXTENDED
SITTING
SECTION

A Special Section
of Longer Pieces

Over the years, we’ve had
numerous requests from BRI members
to include a batch of long articles—
for those leg-numbing experiences.
Well, the BRI aims to please…
So here’s another great way
to pass the uh…time.

You probably didn’t give it much thought the last time you chomped down on a Hershey’s, but the history of chocolate is as rich and as satisfying as the taste of chocolate itself.

On May 9, 1502, Christopher Columbus set sail on his fourth—and what turned out to be last—trip from Spain to the New World. He was searching for a direct water route to Asia, plus whatever riches he could find along the way.

In August 1502, he landed at Guanaja Island, 30 miles off the coast of modern-day Honduras. He spied an enormous dugout canoe in the waters nearby and ordered his men to seize it.

The vessel turned out to be a Mayan trading canoe, probably from somewhere on the Yucatán Peninsula, and it was loaded with a full cargo of trading goods—colorful clothing, wooden swords, flint knives, copper hatchets, small copper bells, and other items. As Columbus’s son Ferdinand recounted years later, the Mayans who had been in the canoe were also carrying a cargo of “almonds.” Very
valuable
almonds, it turned out. Ferdinand wrote:

The natives seemed to hold these almonds at a great price, for when they were brought on board ship together with their goods, I observed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen from their head.

But Columbus wasn’t interested in almonds—he was looking for gold and other riches. “As there was nothing of importance in those Guanaja Islands,” Ferdinand Columbus later wrote, “he did not tarry there.”

Columbus and his men traveled as far south as modern-day Panama before returning home to Spain, where he died in 1506. He never did find his passage to Asia, and although he was the first European to come in contact with the cacao beans he mistook for almonds, he died without ever tasting chocolate.

World’s most popular “laptop”: the Etch-a-Sketch.

The cacao plant is native to Central America. There is evidence that the Maya established cacao plantations as early as 600 A.D., after harvesting and trading the wild cacao beans for hundreds of years. They used cacao beans to make
chocol haa,
or “hot water,” a frothy chocolate beverage flavored with vanilla, hot chili powder, and other spices, including
achiotl,
a spice similar to allspice that left the drinker’s mouth, lips, and facial hair bright red, “as if they had been drinking blood.” But only Maya royalty were allowed to drink
chocol haa;
everyone else had to settle for
balche,
a fermented beverage made from honey and bark. Cacao beans were so valuable that by 1000 A.D. they were being used as currency, which is why Columbus’s captives treated them with such reverence.

The Aztecs acquired a taste for cacao from their contact with the Maya, and by 1200 A.D. they were collecting tributes of cacao from the tribes they dominated, including the Maya. The Aztecs believed that cacao was a gift of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl, who repeatedly brought a cacao tree to Earth on a ray of sunlight and taught early people how to make
cacahuatl,
or “bitter water,” the chocolate beverage that they believed gave them universal wisdom and knowledge.

The Aztecs made
cacahuatl
in much the same way the Maya made
chocol haa:
they ground cacao beans into a powder, stirred it into water, and then gave it a froth by lifting the beverage high in the air and pouring it into a second container on the ground. But unlike the Maya, the Aztecs preferred their
cacahuatl
cold; this was the beverage that the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés was served by the Aztec emperor Montezuma in an elaborate ceremony in 1519, when he became one of the first Europeans, if not the very first, to taste chocolate.

There was certainly nothing like
cacahuatl
in the Old World, and it took a while for Europeans arriving in the New World to acquire a taste for it. “Chocolate…is a crazy thing valued in that country [Mexico],” Jesuit missionary and historian José de Acosta wrote in 1590. “It disgusts those who are not used to it, for it has a foam on top, or a scumlike bubbling.”

“It seemed more a drink for pigs, than a drink for humanity,” agreed the Italian historian Girolamo Benzoni, one of the first people to describe the experience to readers in Europe:

Q: What 2 nations are smaller than New York’s Central Park? A. Monaco and Vatican City.

I was in [Mexico] for more than a year, and never wanted to taste it, and whenever I passed a settlement, some Indian would offer me a drink of it, and would be amazed when I would not accept. But then, as there was a shortage of wine, so as not to be always drinking water, I did like the others. The taste is somewhat bitter, it satisfies and refreshes the body, but does not inebriate, and it is the best and most expensive merchandise, according to the Indians of that country.

With time the Spaniards developed a taste for
cacahuatl
which, like the Maya, they preferred hot, flavored with cinnamon and vanilla and sweetened with cane sugar, which was unknown to the Aztecs. And rather than froth their
cacahuatl
by pouring it from a high container into a low one as the Aztecs had, the Spaniards used a wooden swizzle stick or beater called a
molinillo.
Frothing it with a beater became the standard means of preparing chocolate for the next 200 years.

By the late 1500s, the Spaniards had abandoned the Aztec name
cacahuatl
—“bitter water”—and coined a new word,
chocolatl,
possibly a combination of the Maya word for “hot,”
chocol,
and adding it to the Aztec word for “water,”
atl.

Why would they do this? Their chocolate was sweetened, not bitter and they drank it hot like the Mayans did. But some historians speculate that there may have been another reason: just as the Spaniards were initially disgusted by the bitter taste and frothy brown appearance of
cacahuatl,
they may have also been disgusted by its name.

In many Romance languages, including 16th-century Spanish, the sound
caca
has scatological connotations. “It is hard to believe that the Spaniards were not thoroughly uncomfortable with a noun beginning with
caca
to describe a thick, dark-brown drink which they had begun to appreciate,” anthropologists Sophie and Michael Coe write in
The True History of Chocolate.
The Spaniards “desperately needed some other word, and we would not be at all surprised if it was the learned friars who came up with
chocolatl
and
chocolate.”

The average American consumes 22 gallons of beer a year.

No one knows for sure when chocolate first arrived in Europe. Cortés may have brought some back to Spain with him on his trips in 1519 or 1528. The first
recorded
appearance of chocolate in Europe was in 1544, when some Dominican friars took a delegation of Mayans to visit Prince Philip of Spain. Nobody knows if the prince tried the chocolate, and if so, what he thought of it. In any event, it took a few years for the new taste to catch on in Spain.

By the time the first commercial shipments of cacao beans began arriving in Spain from plantations in Central and South America in 1585, the exotic beverage was appreciated mostly for its “medicinal” value. “This drink is the healthiest thing, and the greatest sustenance of anything you could drink in the world,” one chocolate advocate wrote in the 1550s, “because he who drinks a cup of this liquid, no matter how far he walks, can go a whole day without eating anything else.”

In 1655 England seized the Caribbean island of Jamaica from Spain, including a number of thriving cacao plantations. Up to that point chocolate was practically unheard of outside of Spain. Then, in 1657, London’s first chocolate café opened, advertising “an excellent West India drink, called Chocolat.” Similar cafés soon opened up in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. Hot chocolate quickly established itself as the drink of choice of the European aristocracy (no one else could afford it); by 1690 chocolate was so popular in England that the British Parliament passed a law forbidding the selling of it without a license, giving King William and Queen Mary a financial stake in the booming trade.

In the late 1600s, chocolate began appearing as a flavoring in food. In France you could buy chocolate biscuits and pastilles; in Spain, chocolate rolls and cakes. In Italy, you could order chocolate soup, chocolate liver, and chocolate pasta—including chocolate lasagna. And in 1727, an Englishman named Nicholas Sanders became the first person, as far as historians can tell, to make a hot chocolate drink using milk instead of water.

Myth-conception: No matter what anyone tells you, elephants are
not
afraid of mice.

But you still couldn’t find a chocolate
bar
—not in Europe, not anywhere in the world. Nobody knew how to make chocolate in solid form in the 17th century—chocolate preparation had hardly advanced at all since the time of Cortés. The beans were ground, usually by hand, and then shaped into wafers or cakes that were dissolved in hot water to make drinking chocolate, which if you wanted, you could pour into your food. That was about it.

Things began to change when, in 1828, a Dutch chemist named Coenraad Johannes Van Houten invented a hydraulic press that could remove fatty cocoa butter from the ground cacao beans, leaving behind a solid “cake” that could then be ground into a fine powder—what we know as
cocoa powder.
Then he treated it with alkaline salts to prevent it from separating when added to hot water.

Drinking chocolate was changed forever. As anthropologists Sophie and Michael Coe write in The True
History of Chocolate,

In the year 1828, the age-old, thick and foamy drink was dethroned by easily prepared, more easily digestible cocoa. Van Houten’s invention of the defatting and alkalizing processes made possible the large-scale manufacture of cheap chocolate for the masses, in both powdered and solid form.

The next great change came in 1847, when an English chocolate maker named Francis Fry figured out a way to combine cocoa powder and sugar with melted cocoa butter (instead of the usual warm water) to create a chocolate paste that could be pressed into molds and formed into solid shapes. It was the world’s first eating chocolate, which the firm sold under the sophisticated-sounding French name
Chocolat Délicieux
à
Manger,
(“Delicious Chocolate for Eating”).

Then in 1867, a Swiss chemist named Henri Nestlé discovered how to make powdered milk through evaporation. In 1879, after several years of collaborating with Nestlé, Swiss chocolate maker Daniel Peter finally figured out how to add Nestlé’s powdered milk to his chocolate, creating the world’s first milk chocolate.

That same year, another Swiss chocolate maker, Rudolphe Lindt, invented a process he called “conching.” Until then, chocolate was much coarser and grittier than it is today, kind of like granulated sugar. Lindt’s conching process crushed chocolate paste beneath huge granite rollers for more than 72 hours, at which point the particles became so tiny and smooth that the resulting chocolate literally melts in your mouth—the first chocolate to do that. Lindt’s invention so vastly improved the texture of chocolate that conching quickly became a universal process and coarse, gritty chocolate became a thing of the past.

The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve razorblades.