On Tuesday 19 June 2018 15:40:06 dep wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 6:09 PM, Kate Draven <borglabs4@...> wrote:
> > Now, onto the important stuff. I completely disagree with you on coffee
> > being the first item in the food group. It's clearly chocolate.
>
> chocolate is coffee for children.
>
> dep
>
Unless you are descended from Monteczuma. Somebody tried to reconstruct the 
original royal recipe, and it seems to have contained hot peppers. Now that 
would be an interesting spin on chocolate! Oh yes, and then there is that 
Mexican dish called mole (ague accent over the E), which contains chocolate. 
Chocolate can be so many more things than just candy. 

Long ago, an ethnobotanist informed me that all peppers (the plant, not 
peppercorns) originated in the highlands of Mexico, near present day Yucatan 
and Oaxaca. This, incidentally, establishes that there were some kind of very 
ancient connections between the Americas and Africa; because I found 
references to an Egyptian text (of the tenth century BCE) that mentions the 
use of hot peppers in cooking. Put this together with Olmec sculptures in 
Central America (with clearly African features) and it follows that there 
must have been some contact between Africa and the Americas by at least that 
time. 

Bill