Theobroma Cacao ဆိုတဲ့သစ္ပင္ကေန ကမၻာမွာ အရသာရိွလွတဲ့ ေခ်ာကလက္ဆိုတာကို
ရေစတယ္။ လူတိုင္းသိၾကတာက Cacao (ကာကာအုိ) ဆိုတဲ့သစ္ပင္ကေနရတဲ့ cacao
အေစ့ကေလးေတြက (တခါတရံ cocoa bean လို႔ လည္းေခၚပါတယ္)
ေခ်ာကလက္ကိုရေစတယ္လို႔ပါ။
ဘီစီ 1000 ေလာက္တုန္းကေတာ့ ဒီ Cacao beans ေတြဟာ စားသံုးရာမွာအသံုးျပဳခဲ့ၾကတယ္၊ ေနာက္ပိုင္း ဘီစီ 1000 ေက်ာ္ေတာ့ Mayan နဲ႕ Aztec ဆိုတဲ့ Mexico မွာရိွတဲ့ အေမရိကန္လူမ်ိဳးစုေတြဟာ cacao ကို ေသာက္စရာ အျဖစ္သံုးေဆာင္လာခဲ့ၾကတယ္၊ Mayan လူမ်ိဳးေတြရဲ့ ဘုရား၀တ္ျပဳပြဲနဲ႔ မဂၤလာေဆာင္ပြဲေတြမွာ cacao ကိုေသာက္သံုး ျခင္းဟာ အထူးအေရးႀကီးတဲ့ အစဥ္လာတစ္ရပ္အျဖစ္ယံုၾကည္ခဲ့ၾကတယ္။ Cacao ဟာ က်န္းမာေရး ေကာင္းမြန္ ေစတယ္လို႔လည္း ယံုၾကည္ၾကတယ္။
Discovering the tasty secret of cacao
Most studies agree that the Maya were the first people to discover the secret of "cacao". They grew it in their own backyards, and harvested, fermented, roasted, and ground the seeds into a paste, from which they prepared a frothy, bitter drink.
The Maya covered the Central American territories currently known as southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and a part of El Salvador. They traded with each other over this immense area.
The Maya grew cacao in their backyards and drank it spicy
Cacao trees were naturally found in the tropical rainforests of the Maya homeland. No one can tell how they discovered the tasty secret of cacao, but the Maya valued chocolate so much that they gathered cacao seeds from the rainforest to grow cacao in their own household gardens. These scenes are often shown in ancient glyphs, the Maya written language.
The Maya invented the basics of cacao paste preparation, a 5-step process that is still in use nowadays:
- fermenting the seeds (found inside cacao pods),
- drying the seeds,
- roasting the seeds,
- removing the shells from the beans to get the nibs
- grinding the nibs
The Maya drank chocolate as a frothy, hot and bitter drink, according to the following 2,000 year old recipe:1. Mix the cacao paste with water2 Add spices such as chilli peppers and cornmeal3. Pour the concoction back and forth from cup to pot until it develops thick foam on top4. Sweeten with honey or flower nectar
Cacao was part of daily Maya life
In Maya society, everyone, regardless of status, could enjoy a chocolate drink. The wealthy drank their chocolate from elaborate vessels decorated by specially trained artists. Remarkably, it was the favourite drink of Maya kings and priests. Cacao pods were also used by priests to offer blood, one of the most sacred offerings. Maya couples also drank chocolate as part of their betrothal and marriage ceremonies.
ပီ႐ွဴး ႏုိင္ငံမွာဆိုရင္ ေခ်ာကလက္နဲ႔ ငရုတ္သီးကိုေရာၿပီး စားတာပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ေသာက္တာပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ အစာအိမ္အတြက္ေကာင္းတယ္လို႔ ေျပာစမွတ္ျပဳၾကသတဲ့ (ဘယ္တုန္းကမွ င႐ုတ္သီးနဲ႔ ေခ်ာကလက္ ေရာေသာက္ရတာ မၾကားဖူးရာကေန ဖတ္ရင္းပိုစိတ္၀င္စားလာေရာ) …
Aztecs ဆိုတဲ့ လူမ်ိဳးစုေတြကေတာ့ (diarrhea) အစာအိမ္လမ္းေၾကာင္းလို နာမက်န္းျဖစ္မႈေတြမွာ ကုသႏိုင္တယ္လို႔ ေတြးခဲ့ၾကၿပီး၊ သူ႔မွာ ခ်စ္စိတ္ျဖစ္ေပၚေစႏိုင္တဲ့ အစြမ္းရိွတယ္လို႔လည္း ယံုၾကည္ၾကတယ္၊ (စာထဲမွာေတာ့ Sexual desire ကိုျဖစ္ေစတယ္လို႔ ေရးထားတယ္၊ ဒါေပမဲ့လည္း ယဥ္ေက်းစြာေတြးရင္ေတာ့ မိမိကုိ တစ္ဖက္သားက ပိုခ်စ္လာေအာင္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ၊ ဒါေၾကာင့္မို႔လည္း ခ်စ္သူမ်ားေန႔ေတြမွာ ေခ်ာကလက္ ေကၽြးၾကတဲ့သေဘာဟာ ကိုယ္ခ်စ္တဲ့သူက ကိုယ့္ကိုျပန္ခ်စ္ လာႏိုင္ေအာင္၊ ခ်စ္ၿပီးသားလူက ပိုၿပီးခ်စ္ေအာင္ ေကၽြးတာေနမွာေပါ့…)
Aztecs ဆိုတဲ့ လူမ်ိဳးစု အႀကီးအကဲတစ္ေယာက္က ဆိုရင္ တစ္ေန႔ကို ေခ်ာကလက္နဲ႔ ငရုတ္သီး ေရာထားတဲ့အရည္ကို အခြက္ ငါးဆယ္ ေသာက္ႏုိင္သတဲ့ … (က်န္းမာေရးေကာင္းေအာင္လုိ႔)
The Aztecs: the value of cacao
The Aztecs discovered cacao when they gained control over Mayas in southern areas of Mesoamerica. Soon cacao became of great economic importance, as it became a form of currency throughout the Aztecs' vast trade empire. The chocolate drink turned into an upper class privilege.
1200 - 1521 Mesoamerica
The Aztecs originated in central Mexico and expanded their territory all the way down to the Maya lands in Honduras.
Aztecs carried cacao on their backs for 900 miles
The Aztecs could not grow cacao in their territory, dry highlands of central Mexico. Instead, they traded with the Maya, or, taking advantage of their ruling over Maya lands, they required Inhabitants of cacao-growing areas to pay tribute (taxes) in cacao seeds. The Aztec traders carried their precious cargo for hundreds of miles, up to the capital, Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), on foot, in woven backpacks.
Blood-red chocolate for rituals...
Because cacao seeds had to travel over such long distances to reach the Aztecs, they bought fermented and dried, making the valuable cargo weight less. From there, the Aztecs used the process and tools as the Maya to prepare the cacao paste. They flavoured the traditional Maya beverage with vanilla beans and/or black peppers. For ritual and religious purposes, the Aztecs added annatto to turn the chocolate into a blood-red liquid.
Cacao a as a currency
As cacao seeds were worth a fortune, drinking chocolate was a luxury few Aztecs could afford: among them, rulers, priests, decorated warriors, and honoured merchants.According to an Aztec legend, it is the god Quetzalcoatl who brought heavenly cacao to Earth. For this blasphemous act of giving this sacred drink to humans, he was cast out of paradise. As a result, chocolate was thought as being the food of the gods, and priests often made offerings of cacao seeds to Quetzalcoatl and other deities.
Because of their value, cacao seeds were used as currency in Aztec society. Below you can see how much basic things cost in the city of Tlaxcala, 1545 AD.
- A turkey cock: 200 cocoa beans
- A turkey hen: 100 cocoa beans
- The daily wage of a porter: 100 cocoa beans
- A forest rabbit: 100 cocoa beans
- A small rabbit: 30 cocoa beans
- A turkey egg: 3 cocoa beans
- An avocado: 3 cocoa beans
- A fish in maize husks: 3 cocoa beans
- A large tomato: 1 cocoa bean
- A large sapote fruit: 1 cocoa bean
Cocoa Bean ေၾကာင့္ စစ္ပြဲေတြမ်ားစြာျဖစ္ခဲ့တယ္၊ ႏုိင္ငံကုိ က်ဴးေက်ာ္သိမ္းပုိက္မႈေတြလည္းရွိခဲ့တယ္။
http://www.worldstandards.eu/chocolate%20-%20history.html
THEOBROMA "CACAO" အပုိင္း ၂
