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Preparing these beverages was an elaborate and labor-intensive process.The drinks played an important role in Mayan rituals, and were used in betrothal and marriage ceremonies. One menu served a Mayan ruler includes "green cacao pods, honeyed chocolate, flowered chocolate flavored with green vanilla, bright red chocolate, huitztecolli flower-flavored chocolate, flower-colored chocolate, black chocolate, and white chocolate." Modern chocolate lovers' options seem dull by comparison!
Cacao beans also served as cash in Mesoamerica. Only once a bean was too worn to serve as currency was it used for making chocolate. A 16th-century chronicler, Francisco Oviedo y Valdés, recorded that a rabbit was worth about ten of these "almonds," a slave about a hundred, and the services of a prostitute between eight and ten, "according to how they agree."
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