Before Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World, no one in Europe had ever heard of chocolate. It wasn't until Spanish explorers arrived in Mexico, where cocoa beans grew, that Europeans were introduced to the world of chocolate.
It was the Aztecs who showed the Spaniards how to prepare a drink from cocoa beans, and it was from these explorers that chocolate was introduced to Spain.
However, chocolate did not become popular in countries other than Spain until the mid seventeenth century. And even then, and for a long time, Europeans only enjoyed chocolate in drink form, never in solid form, as we do today. Solid bars of chocolate to eat were not invented until 1876!
Strangely enough, even today, chocolate is not popular in most parts of the world. It is grown mainly in Africa and Latin America, but few people in the world eat it. The United States and nine European countries consume most of the chocolate produced in the world.
The Aztecs believed that eating cocoa beans gave them the wisdom and knowledge of the gods!
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