![]() This article is a selection from the September/October 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine SubscribeĬlemencia Murillo and her husband, Mariano Ortiz, peel Nacional pods at their home in Camarones as their grandchildren look on. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99 (While Ecuador was the center of the Nacional trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, Peru also boasted some of these precious trees.) Now, a partnership between local growers and Ecuador’s ecological preservationists is pulling this legendary cacao variety back from the brink of extinction. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, in collaboration with Fortunato Chocolate, an American-founded company based in Peru, announced it had identified cacao trees in Peru that had ancient Nacional DNA. The Nacional, with its distinctive and celebrated flavor, seemed to be a thing of the past-the dodo bird of the chocolate world.īut in 2011, to the astonishment of the world, the U.S. Cacao yields in Ecuador plummeted, and growers introduced new hybrid and foreign varieties. Then, in 1916, a blight called frosty pod rot ravaged cacaos, including Nacionals, and in 1919, the witches’ broom disease was thought to have finished off Nacional trees for good. The Jama-Coaque Reserve is home to a genetic bank of 189 ancient Nacional clones. In Hamburg, Germany, then the center of the global cocoa trade, Nacional was particularly prized. Ecuador’s integration into the world economy in the 19th century was almost entirely dependent on the cocoa trade in the late 1800s and early 1900s, its popularity exploded as chocolate became a craze in Europe. ![]() The variety soon attained a global reputation for its strong aroma. ![]() A 2012 study found that European colonists began planting Nacionals themselves in the New World roughly a century after Columbus. ![]() Scholars estimate that Nacional was first cultivated more than 5,000 years ago, in what is now the Zamora Chinchipe province, and ancient traders planted these Nacional trees near the coast. I could understand why this fateful breed of chocolate had made chocolatiers swoon for generations-and why some modern-day chocoholics are willing to fork over several hundred dollars for a single bar.Ī cacao tree from the Codex Tudela, an illustrated 16th-century Aztec text. I had never tasted chocolate like this-smooth and silky yet almost supernaturally bold in its flavor. He gave a smile when the sugary chocolate, served in a shot glass, touched my tongue I think I might have moaned in pleasure. Servio Pachard, one of the world’s foremost cacao experts, combined that paste in a metal bowl with sugar and other ingredients, his jaunty straw hat dipping over dark eyes. And the beans, once roasted and hand-ground into a thick paste, give off a rich scent of pure dark chocolate that becomes almost overpoweringly seductive. The flesh is peachy and bright, with a fragrant and sugary bouquet. Then I tasted its fruit in its fresh, raw, pure form. It was hard to believe this shriveled yellow pod contained one of the world’s rarest and most coveted cacao beans. Of all the heirloom cacao pods laid before us on a rickety wooden table, on this quiet hillside outside the city of Manta in Ecuador, the ancient variety known as Nacional was misleadingly plain.
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