What is Chocolate

Chocolate
Chocolate comes from the fermented, roasted, and ground beans of the Theobroma cacao, the cacao or cocoa tree. The word "Chocolate" comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. The Nauhaul word xocolatl means "bitter water". The Precolumbian peoples of the Americas drank chocolate mixed with vanilla, chile pepper, and achiote.

Europeans sweetened it by adding sugar and milk and removing the chile pepper. They later created a process to make solid chocolate creating the modern chocolate bar. Although cocoa is originally from the Americas, today Western Africa produces almost two-thirds of the world´s cocoa, with Côte d'Ivoire growing almost half of it.

Today, it is one of the most popular and recognizable flavors in the world. There are many foods that contain chocolate such as chocolate bars, candy, ice cream, cookies, cakes, pies, chocolate mousse, and other desserts.

History of chocolate
The word "chocolate" entered the English language from Spanish. How the word came into Spanish is less certain, and there are multiple competing explanations. Perhaps the most cited explanation is that "chocolate" comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, from the word "chocolatl", which many sources derived from the Nahuatl word "xocolatl" (pronounced [ ʃoˈkolaːtɬ]) made up from the words "xococ" meaning sour or bitter, and "atl" meaning water or drink. However, as William Bright noted the word "chocolatl" doesn't occur in central Mexican colonial sources making this an unlikely derivation. Santamaria gives a derivation from the Yucatec Maya word "chokol" meaning hot, and the Nahuatl "atl" meaning water. More recently Dakin and Wichman derive it from another Nahuatl term, "chicolatl" from Eastern Nahuatl meaning "beaten drink". They derive this term from the word for the frothing stick, "chicoli". The word xocoatl means beverage of maize.The words "cacaua atl" mean drink of cacao. The word "xocolatl" does not appear in Molina's dictionary.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chocolate