chocolate

Before chocolate became a candy bar, it was a drink with a complicated personality: the Aztecs prepared it with cold water, while the Spanish conquistadors preferred it hot. The word reached Spanish around the time of the conquest of Mexico and entered English around 1600, but its Nahuatl source, chocolātl, remains mysterious. One proposed explanation connects its first element with a Nahuatl verb meaning “to make bitter or sour”; another suggests influence from a Mayan word for “hot.” So even the name may preserve an argument about what mattered most in the cup—the bitterness, the temperature, or both. Samuel Pepys was already recording “jocolatte” in his diary on November 24, 1664, long before chocolate solidified into candy in the nineteenth century. Remember it as a linguistic journey from a Mesoamerican drinking vessel to a European sweet: first a beverage, then a paste, and finally the small square that mysteriously disappears from the box.