Dia VI: El Cacao

Cacao Vendor

Today was a lovely day at Campamento Margaritas. Though I am feeling quite run down with a cold that has stubbornly lodged itself in my head and sinuses for the past three days, everybody else was in fine spirits. And why not? For today, we made chocolate. But I should back track as the story really started last Thursday. On that morning, Evan, Camila, Anthony, Tanya and myself went off on a  great adventure to find cacao beans in the market in town. It was hot, superhot really, and muddy and the market was filled with people, which was great, and motorcycles, which was not so great. And vendors selling everything from passionf ruit, to avocados, to bluejeans to toothbrushes. We asked vendor after vendor if they knew of a man who was selling cacao beans. They all pointed vaguely in a certain direction and we went off until we found another person to ask. At one point, a vendor asked us to watch his stall while he went looking for the illusive cacao vendor. Alas, he came back in ten minutes with only the news that somewhere deep in the bowels of the market, was a stall that sold all sorts of medicinal herbs, one of which was cacao beans. So, we headed inside and followed a maze of very dark passages that led from one vendor to another. I felt like I was in an Indiana Jones movie, searching for the illusive cacao vendor who held the secrets to everything. Finally, we found him. He did, in fact, have the answers to everything, at least in terms of medicinal herbs, of which he sold many. He gave Camila a bag of some mysterious herb and told her that when she had a sore throat she should boil the herbs and then gargle with the solution. And he had cacao beans, of which we bought 200 pesos worth.

Peeling Cacao Beans

And that brings us to today. Dona Yolanda toasted the cacao beans yesterday and today we had all the students help complete the process. Before we began, Dona Yolanda explained that cacao beans, along with sugar cane and coffee have been historically the major crops of the DR. She added that eating cacao is good for people with anemia and for women who have just given birth, as it helps to bring the mother's milk in.
Then, the students peeled all the cacao beans and Don Tilo placed them in a giant pestle and used a mortar to grind the beans into a paste. By the way, any day that you get to use a giant mortar and pestle is a good one in my book. All of the students got a turn helping out (I didn't help and feel like I should have. It seems like grinding cacao beans into chocolate is something that one should do in one's life and I can't imagine when I'll have another opportunity to do so.) and Dona Yolanda added some cinnamon and sugar to sweeten the beans. It was a magical process as the beans first broke down into small pieces and then, slowly reconstituted into an oily paste that, once the bitterness was cut with sugar, was delicious. Each students was given a small ball of the chocolate paste to take home to eat as is or to make into hot chocolate; a staple of children's breakfast here.

Making the Cacao Paste

Before today, many of the students had no idea even that chocolate came from cacao beans. When Tanya asked them how to make chocolate, they all responded: "Well, first you boil water, then you add the piece of chocolate, some cinnamon, a pinch of salt, some sugar and finally some milk."  They are completely correct of course, if the question were how to make hot chocolate but underlies an observation that Tanya has made; that children in the DR really don't have a great sense of where their food comes from. Perhaps in connecting the food they eat to the land from which they come, children will better value the need to protect their land.

Wow, that sounds wicked altruistic and self-serving. Perhaps it was just a great day making chocolate, as how could it be otherwise?