Drinking for the Dead

Salted Sipping Hot Chocolate

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.

Thornton Wilder

On this week’s Día de Muertos recipe series: Drinking for Muertos.

I owe so much of my life to cacao.

When I first moved to the U.S. from México, I couldn’t believe it when I saw hot chocolate on coffee shop menus everywhere. I naively thought Americans also drank the intense bitter elixir made with stone-ground cacao I grew up sipping. Until I tried it… It was more like a melted chocolate candy bar; it was incredibly sweet and topped with marshmallows and whipped cream. It was the candy version of the Aztec’s gold coins.

In Aztec culture, Cacao was a drink connected to death and rebirth. Cacao beans were considered more valuable than gold. Codices and artwork often depict vessels filled with cacao beverages being offered to deities and being used in funerary rites and important ceremonies.

This made me curious about the cultural significance of cacao in Mexico, so much so that I wrote my thesis on the cult of drinking cacao. It was at that moment that I knew everything I did with my life had to shift to food.

During my thesis, I consumed so much cacao that I felt so high on theobroma, known as “food of the gods” (theo=god, and broma=food). It felt like a spiritual experience.

Instead of Champagne, I made drinking chocolate for our wedding toast in Vallarta when Javier and I married.

Last week, I attended a class on Cacao Teachings for Women by