In honor of Mother’s Day, I thought I’d take a look at the history of one of my mom’s favorite desserts: chocolate.

So where does chocolate from?

The earliest signs we have of chocolate consumption go back to 2,000 BC in what was called Mesoamerica (what today is roughly Central America).

And for the vast majority of chocolate’s history, it was consumed as a drink, not as a food — only in the last 150 years has chocolate emerged in the form we know it today.  In fact, the word “chocolate” is derived from the Aztec word “xocoatl,” which was a bitter drink created from cacao beans.

Here you can see the cacao fruit as it grows on a tree, and the seeds inside which we use to make chocolate:

For the Mayans and Aztecs, cacao was held in very high esteem: cacao pods were represented in temples, and beans were used as currency as well as to make the xocatl drinks which often had medicinal purposes.

In the 1500s, Cortez brought cacao back to Spain after conquering Mexico and it spread throughout Europe. It made its way to America in the 1700s (and was given to soldiers in the Revolutionary War).

In the mid 1800s, European chemists created the first modern chocolate bars, which soon began to be marketed by companies like Cadbury’s.  In 1875, the first milk chocolate bar hit the market.

Today, most cacao is grown in West Africa and in 2009 total chocolate candy sales were $5 billion across supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandise outlets.  “Premium” chocolate, which has higher cocoa percentages — e.g. 70% cacao vs. a Hershey bar’s 30% cacao — has recently been a major growth area.

But if you don’t like eating or drinking it, at least you can bathe in it. Enjoy!

If there were to be a vote by the 7 billion of us alive today plus the other 100 billion of us (give or take) who have ever walked the earth, the one thing we would of course unanimously agree on is that the best dessert of all time is Key Lime Pie.

Which leads to the natural question: where did this creation come from?  Did Key Limes and graham crackers become more than friends one day, combining two great families of tart and sweet lineage?  Seems plausible.

But consensus seems to be that that the Key Lime Pie was born in the late 1800s at the hands of a cook in Key West, Florida, who built on the work of a dessert created by local fishermen.

The cook, named Aunt Sally, worked for the town’s richest man, William Curry, who made his fortune as a “wrecker”, the term for those who salvaged cargo on shipwrecks and then resold their captured booty for a handsome profit. (Hemmingway, who lived in Key West from 1931-1940, lived in a grand home built by another local wrecker.)

In recognition of its invaluable contributions to taste buds everywhere, Key Lime Pie was made the official pie of Florida in 2006.

No doubt further accolades are not far behind.