Martius and the Divine Food

“As is known, the cacao from Pará and the Rio Negro is considered of medium or even inferior quality, due to its somewhat harsh and bitter taste, and because it contains less of the sweet oil. This is partly because the cacao here is harvested from wild trees rather than planted ones. In their wild state, plants produce more of their specific properties, which, as far as cacao is concerned, we should add the bitter ingredient, comparable to caffeine (...).”

“On the other hand, there is more oil in the fruit of the planted tree; fatty oils in the fruits are produced in a greater proportion under cultivation. The Maranhão beans, therefore, are mostly flattened, less substantial than the inferior varieties.”

“The procedure of burying the beans in order to reach fermentation without access to much air, which prevents germination and sets the bitter aroma, is ignored (..). They simply dry the seeds in the sun and stop stirring them so that they all come into contact with the air. When harvesting wild cacao, this preparation would often be difficult in local conditions, because in the humid lowlands of the igapó forests, there are no free dry spaces and the collectors are sometimes restricted to canoes.”

Martius wrote regarding this mixture of seeds: “I found Theobroma bicolor, discovered by Humboldt and Bonpland in Choco province, also near the mouth of the Rio Negro, in Manacuru and in the Japurá in a wild state, and besides this I found several other cacao species (...)”.