Unknown Artist
We continue our special month with North Carolina Museum of Art collection; we hope you enjoy it! : )
Spanish conquistadors brought chocolate from the New World to Europe in the early 16th century. Chocolate was first enjoyed in Europe as a drink, made by grating chocolate paste into wine or water, sweetened with sugar and flavored with vanilla and various spices. During the 17th and 18th centuries, hot chocolate was a favorite drink of people of all social classes in Spain.
This engaging image shows a young man kneeling as he scrapes a large slab of chocolate. The scraping is done on a metate, a type of grinding stone widely used by natives of Mexico and Guatemala for grinding corn and probably, like chocolate, introduced into Spain from the New World. Below the stone, a small container holds a fire producing heat to soften the hard chocolate so that it can be ground more easily. The large bowl in the foreground contains some of the ground material, and before it, patties of chocolate rest in a wooden container and on a letter or document. The writing is largely indecipherable, although there are fragments of Spanish words, such as casa (house) at the lower left.
P.S. There's nothing like chocolate! Click here to get a taste for a cup of warm, hot chocolate drink.
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