Asia Times Online


	April 13, 2002	atimes.com

Front

FINER THINGS
Sweet, brown pleasure
By Chawadee Nualkhair

I have bitter memories of chocolate. As a cooking student in France, I spent every Monday learning patisserie, making traditional French desserts such as tarte tatin and creme caramel. In learning these desserts, we were preparing for what we would likely be asked to make during the cooking section of our exams at the end of the year. But a long series of Mondays leading up to Christmas were a miserable slog devoted exclusively to making chocolates - boxes and boxes of them, truffles and caramel-centered and liqueur-filled, which would later be tied up with ribbons and sold as products of the cooking school. Of course, we never saw a sou of the profits.

There is nothing worse to eat than food made by someone in despair, who could care less. Chocolates remind me of that. But, obviously, chocolates don't inspire the same sort of feeling in everybody. Indeed, a simple Internet search comes up with almost 5 million results from the word "chocolate". According to CNN, the average American consumes 12 pounds (nearly 5.5 kilograms) of chocolate a year. It has a much-vaunted ability to trigger "feel good" chemicals in the brain - indeed, scientists are said to have extracted a stimulant called theobromine from chocolate to add to Coca-Cola. Chocolate is also argued to have properties combating heart disease due to its high levels of phenol, according to the University of California-Davis. And that thing about its ingestion leading to pimples is said to be a myth.

My patisserie instructor Christophe was on to something. Chocolate is big business. The Mars family (of Snickers, Twix, and of course Mars bar fame) is worth a whopping US$12 billion, writes the author of The Emperors of Chocolate, Joel Glenn Brenner. According to Brenner, Milton Hershey (yes, of those Hershey's Kisses) made more than $60 million at the turn of the century before leaving it all to a home for orphaned boys before his death (and he also foretold the beginnings of desserts made from such unusual ingredients as beetroot and onion, way before those folks at Arpege and Au Grand Vefours). An extensive intelligence unit informed Mars of the goings-on of rivals all over the world, even employing members of the US Central Intelligence Agency to keep Mars abreast of the chocolate market in the then Soviet Union.

Who would have thought that a simple seed from the cacao tree, when roasted, ground, and fermented, would turn into the worldwide phenomenon that is chocolate? The cacao tree is an indigenous evergreen in the Latin American region, says food historian Alan Davidson, which sprouts flowers that grow directly on the tree's trunk. Only some of these flowers will develop into fruit, shaped like large melons that are yellow or red in color. The fruits are split and the contents removed, and the seeds inside are left to bake in the sun and ferment - said by Davidson to be essential to the final flavor of the chocolate. These seeds are then dried and sent to manufacturers to be turned into the brown solid form we recognize as chocolate.

The Mayans were said to mix their hot chocolate drinks with chilies and vanilla; this pre-Columbian civilization learned about chocolate from the earlier Olmecs, who according to Davidson are the earliest-known consumers of chocolate. Later, because of the temperamental nature of cacao trees, the seeds became a valued commodity that sparked off wars and stood in as currency. The Aztecs, for their part, liked their chocolate drinks cold and mixed with honey, an after-meal beverage reserved for the upper classes. They also flavored their chocolate with flower petals and herbs.

But the Old World wouldn't come into contact with chocolate until Christopher Columbus captured a Mayan trading canoe carrying cacao beans in 1502, thinking the beans (or seeds) were money. The Spaniards, however, invading only a decade later, would discover chocolate's charms when the black "almonds" they saw the Aztecs consuming were converted into the frothy drinks served at banquets held in their honor. It is during this period, says Davidson, that the innovation of mixing hot water with ground cacao, sapote kernels, maize, and seasonings was dubbed chocolatl, blending the Mayan word chocol (hot) with the Nahuatl for "water", atl. The Spaniards also introduced the flavoring of their chocolate drinks with cane sugar, cinnamon, and anise.

The Kekchi Maya of Guatemala are credited with bringing chocolate to Europe in 1544, when a group of Dominican friars brought them to visit Philip II of Spain. The Spanish court soon made the art of chocolate-drinking their own, adopting the cup and saucer mancerina, exclusively devoted to drinking chocolate. The ingredient then began to take on aphrodisiac properties in the minds of many Europeans (thanks to some well-executed marketing efforts, no doubt) and then medicinal ones as well. A Roman doctor characterized chocolate as a Portuguese medicine, according to Davidson, and at the court of Cosimo III de Medici, experiments of chocolate mixed with jasmine, citrus peel, musk, and ambergris were conducted by the resident doctor there.

Chocolate shifted from a drink to a flavoring in Italy (where it flavored, improbably, risotto and pasta along with cakes and nougat) and finally France, when confectioners sprinkled their biscuits and sweetmeats with the stuff. The marquis de Sade was said to be a big fan, requesting supplies of chocolate biscuits and cakes from his wife while in prison. Chocolate wouldn't hit England until the mid-1600s - and even then, it was sold by a Frenchman. But the English are the ones credited with making the addition of milk to their chocolate drinks a common practice. By the beginning of the 1700s, chocolate made that long trek back across the Atlantic to the New World, where it began to be sold in the New England colonies.

Chocolate only became a solid block when in 1842 Cadbury Brothers began selling a "French" bar made from the excess cocoa butter created in the manufacture of "cocoa" drinks, at first the more lucrative business. Of course, we all know what the most sought-after product of the cacao bean is now: Cadbury's innovation was soon produced and improved upon by Swiss manufacturers Rodolphe Lindt and Henri Nestle. People started adding nuts, fruit, biscuits and liqueurs to their chocolates. And sweets titans like Messrs Mars and Hershey were born.

Now, chocolates have become so ubiquitous that they have irreversibly formed a part of the Western culture, and are quickly settling down into the Eastern one. No one, it appears, can resist the sweet, "addictive" blend of mashed cacao bean, cocoa butter, and milk that comes packaged in foil to supermarkets all over the world these days. No one, apparently, but me.

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