Question for January 2018

Probably. Keep in mind that Maya and Aztecs mixed chocolatl with lots of other ingredients: I guess the most common of these was hot chile. (Chocolatl is an Aztec word; Cocoa comes from the Mayan Kakaw/cacao.) Straight chocolate (baking chocolate), as you know, is bitter. it wasn’t till Dutch merchants added sugar that Europeans really got addicted to it.
For thousands of years before they discovered that roasting chocoloate made it good to eat, people (and monkeys) ate only the pulp, the sweet white gunk that surrounds the cacao beans in the pod, and spat out the seeds.
My friend Michael Coe wrote, with his wife Sophie (a great cook) The True History of Chocolate, which I recommend.

French translation of the first serious European study of chocolate - ‘Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate’ by Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma (1631)