Like all the best things, chocolate was introduced to Europe in the 16th Century through carnage, bloodshed and ruthless exploitation. It’s first incarnation, a sacred Aztec drink called xocolatl, was ‘discovered’ by Columbus. But the bitter, scummy and peppery drink had been intensely disliked by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, so it never made it past the first round of auditions. Luckily for us, Hernando Cortés thought it a product worth pursuing and modified the mixture with sugar and vanilla making it more palatable and wowing the Spanish court.
At first it was very expensive, the reserve of aristocrats, and not universally liked. One critic proclaimed the mixture of cocoa beans, sugar, cinnamon, red pepper, cloves, fennel and aniseed a “wash fitter for hogs” - and he might well have been right! But xocolatl was here to stay and went through various modifications as it traveled from Spain to Vienna, then onto France and England before reaching it’s current well-loved status and Milton Hershey’s vision of the “snack of the future”. Boy, am I glad I'm living in the future...
My favourite chocolate experiences are:
- A cup of extra thick hot chocolate at cafe chain Apostrophe, I like to pretend it's close to the Aztec original, which if course it isn't. But, it is delicious and really thick!
- Visiting Selfridges chocolate section beside the food hall, the moving conch display at Artisan du Chocolate is worth starting with, to get your mouth watering...Other notables are the Maison du Chocolate stand, good old Godiva and those round boxes of champagne truffles from Charbonnel et Walker.
- Bags of broken Easter egg from Leonidas after Easter weekend - for some reason it tastes even better than the intact egg (I always get both - just to be sure).
- Leonidas's cherry liquor - literally a whole Cherry (with stalk and stone) infused with cherry liquor and all enrobed in dark chocolate. Truly divine!
- The Film 'Chocolat' with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.
For further reading on this subject I highly recommend “The Connoisseur’s Guide to Chocolate” by Chantal Coady, where I gleaned most of the information for this post. It features lots of interesting facts about the history and production of chocolate as well as a directory of the best chocolate makers in the world.
A comment from my friend Pete Manhire:
ReplyDeleteHere's a (long) quotation from one of Sir Terry Pratchett's inimitable DiscWorld books (I have changed the locations - I'm sure he will forgive me).....
"(British) people are hearty, no-nonsense folk who did not WANT choc...olate that was stuffed with cocoa liquor, and were certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who wanted cream with everything. In fact, they actually PREFERRED chocolate made mostly from milk, sugar, suet, hooves, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders and powdered cocoa husks. This meant that according to the food standards of the great chocolate centres of (Belgium) and (Switzerland), (British) chocolate was formally classed as "cheese" and only just escaped, through being the wrong colour, being defined as "tile grout".