by Sarah Moss
Notably, in the Western world, advertising visions of chocolate as sexual indulgence are directed almost exclusively at white women. Given the enduring and often overt racial overtones of chocolate, the implied ‘sin’ in a number of adverts is miscegenation. Chocolate is often presented to women in adverts by dark-skinned men in ‘native’ clothes, suggesting at once subservience and invoking ideas of ‘native’ sexual prowess. Similarly, when black women appear associated with chocolate, they are normally not the consumer but the (sexually) consumed. In 1996 Suchard chocolates produced an advertisement in France that showed a black woman, Tyra Banks (who made headlines most recently with an on-air feminist rant about women’s body image), dressed only in small pieces of gold foil that look like the remnants of a chocolate wrapper and that also enhance the ‘exotic’ image by resembling tiger stripes. The caption of the advert read, ‘Even though you said no, we heard yes.’ While French adverts normally feature more nude female flesh and overt references to sex than those in the US or Britain, the clear reference to rape in the advert crossed a line. After a vigorous protest from women’s groups, the designer apologised and the advert was withdrawn. Significantly, the racial element of the advert received little or no mention within the ensuing controversy.
Another ambiguous confrontation with the ‘chocolate as black woman’ theme came on Dutch television following the announcement in 2006 that the manufacturer of chocolate marshmallow confections known as ‘Negro kisses’ were changing the name to ‘kisses’. Much of the public discussion around the change was about whether it was a matter of political correctness gone mad, and many who had grown up with the confection made no conscious connection between the sweet treats of their childhoods and disparaging racial images. The night the story made the television news, the newsreader Aldith Hunkar, who is of Afro-Caribbean origin, changed her regular sign-off. After she had wrapped up with most of the standard phrases, she paused, a mischievous smile spread over her face and she said, ‘and the last negro kiss you get from me’ and aimed a kiss at the camera. Judging from the discussion that ensued, anti-PC audiences saw this as evidence that she was on their side, and that her presence as a successfully integrated part of Dutch society was proof that the racial prejudice and inequality suggested by the name had long since disappeared. The shock it caused, however, with its reminder that the term still invokes images that apply to real people, made the light-hearted gesture seem far more ambiguous.
That ambiguity, or rather series of ambiguities, offers as good a summation as any of the current place of chocolate in our lives and indeed throughout much of its history. It remains a puzzling mixture between familiar and exotic, global and local, guilty pleasure and overlooked injustice. Its various stories disappear and reappear in sometimes unexpected times and ways. In describing their work as the ongoing construction of an idea and a myth, chocolatiers Amadei have come closest, and perhaps closer than intended, to capturing the various things chocolate means: ‘The chocolate is an idea in which white and black blend; the pleasure and the transgression blend in lines and curves. We follow the emotions that transform the chocolate into the most precious myth, one which holds together childhood memories and the satisfaction of senses.’
Recipes
Chocolate and Lavender Cream
This is chocolate at its most deracinated. The use of herbs in sweet foods is an English habit going back to the Middle Ages, although perhaps also borrowed from the Middle East, and lavender has recently returned to fashion in food as well as perfume. All the ingredients except the chocolate are foreign to the New World. (Some consequences of globalization are to be celebrated.)
Serves 8
250 g (8 oz) granulated sugar
250 g (8 fl oz) white wine
juice of ½ lemon
600 ml (1 pint) double cream
1 or 2 lavender stems, with flowers
165 g (5½oz) good plain chocolate, grated
Mix the sugar, wine and lemon juice in a heavy-based pan. Heat gently until the sugar dissolves, stirring occasionally. Stir in the cream and cook over a gentle heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. Add the lavender and the grated chocolate, and stir until the chocolate dissolves. Bring to the boil and then simmer the mixture for twenty minutes, or until dark and thick. Remove the lavender stems.
Cool, then pour into eight or more ramekins or small glasses. Cover the top with cling film and refrigerate (they keep well for 3–4 days). Decorate with a sprig of lavender.
Cowboy Cookies
Chocolate chip cookies have become synonymous with America, though as with so many national traditions, they are a relatively recent invention. The first ones, and the product they now contain, were famously developed in the 1930s by Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts in partnership with Nestlé. In spite of their novelty, their connection with the Inn spoke of quaint, colonial New England tradition.
The following recipe, the ‘Cowboy Cookie’, shows a further adaptation of the chocolate chip cookie into US national fantasy, with the addition of oatmeal somehow adding connotations of frontier life. They have been the Badenoch family recipe since grandmother Edith Badenoch spotted it in a women’s magazine in the late 1940s. It is an economical recipe very much of its time – it’s hard to imagine a recipe these days leading off with shortening. The ‘cowboy’ moniker also proved useful in persuading children who were sceptical about having their cookie recipe stretched with oatmeal.
1 cup (190 g) shortening
1 cup (180 g) brown sugar
1 cup (200 g) white sugar
2 eggs
¼ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda
2 cups (240 g) flour
1 cup (180 g) chocolate chips
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups (180 g) oatmeal
Cream the shortening, brown sugar, white sugar and eggs until smooth, then mix in baking powder, salt, baking soda and vanilla. Add flour a little at a time, then stir in chocolate chips and oatmeal. Bake at 325° C for 12–15 minutes or until done.
‘Historic’ Hot Chocolate
This is a melange, an invention using modern ingredients in vague homage to the irrecoverable tastes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is not ‘Aztec’, because we assume you do not have access to unrefined cacao or South American flora, and we assume that you prefer your chocolate sweetened. It might be rather like the beverage drunk at the Austens’ wedding breakfast.
water and/or milk
approx. 30 g unsweetened chocolate per person (or, since
you will be adding sugar anyway, your preferred chocolate)
grated sugar
cinnamon bark, vanilla, ginger and/or (inauthentically)
cardamom
Heat the water or milk with the spices. When it boils, turn off the heat and remove the cardamom or vanilla pods or cinnamon bark. Add the chocolate. Stir until it dissolves. Add sugar as needful (less is probably more ‘authentic’), whisk and serve.
Venison Casserole
This old English dish involves the medieval combination of meat and spices, given depth by the addition of cocoa.
olive oil
2 large or 3 small onions
3 cloves of garlic
6 rashers smoked bacon or pancetta
1 kg diced venison
2 tbsp plain flour
300 g mushrooms
4 or 5 carrots
a glass or two of drinkable red wine
around 500 ml beef, chicken or vegetable stock
1 tbsp cocoa powder
a piece of cinnamon bark of around 5 cm
8–12 cloves, according to taste
In a deep casserole, fry the onions and garlic with the pancetta or bacon until soft and golden. Meanwhile, wash and slice the mushrooms and carrots. Remove the onions to a plate, turn up the heat and sear the venison with the flour in the pan until it is browned. Reduce the heat, return the onions, garlic
and bacon to the pan and add the mushrooms and carrots. Sauté until the mushrooms begin to shed their liquor and then add the wine and enough stock to cover the meat and vegetables. Add the cocoa powder, cinnamon bark and cloves. Bring to the boil and then either simmer or place in a slow oven (around 130°c) for two or three hours, until the meat is soft but not falling apart. Serve with rice or baked potatoes and winter vegetables.
Chocolate Biscuit Cake
Another very English use of chocolate. Depending on the chocolate and the biscuits you choose, this can be as sophisticated or childish as you like; digestive biscuits and milk chocolate will produce something very different from stem ginger cookies or amaretti and a high-cocoa plain chocolate. For a mint version which, like the lavender pots, uses traditional herbs in an unusual context, omit the dried fruit and, before putting the cake in the fridge, spread over the top melted mint chocolate or chocolate to which you have added a few drops of peppermint oil.
300 g biscuits
300 g chocolate
100 g unsalted butter, cut into cubes
150 g chopped dried fruit, to taste (raisins are traditional, prunes
work well, apricots or cherries would also be good)
3 tbsp brandy (optional)
If you are using the fruit, put it in a bowl and pour over the brandy. Put the biscuits inside at least two food-grade plastic bags and break them into a mixture of crumbs and small pieces with a rolling pin. Melt the butter in a large, heavy-based pan and add the chocolate, broken into pieces. Heat gently until the chocolate has melted. Add the broken biscuits and fruit to the chocolate and butter, stir well to combine and pour into a roasting tin, pressing the mixture down as necessary. This can be topped with more melted chocolate at this stage. Place the tin in the fridge to set.
Experimental Chocolate Truffles
As we have seen, making your own chocolate from raw ingredients is not a possibility in the domestic kitchen, but these are an easy way of exploring possible (and impossible) combinations. Made with any kind of chocolate, these can take any flavouring you care to experiment with: flowers (rose, jasmine, violet), spices (vanilla, cardamom, chilli), herbs (rosemary, lemon balm, thyme), fruit (citrus zest, crushed raspberries, mango pulp). You could also add coffee, almost any kind of spirits, aromatic teas or whatever else seems likely to work.
275 ml whipping cream
450 g chocolate
Put your chosen flavouring into the cream and heat gently. Turn off the stove and leave it to infuse until you have achieved the desired strength (probably around 20–30 minutes for more subtle flavours and rather less for chilli, coffee or pepper). Melt the chocolate, either in a bowl over simmering water or gently and carefully on the stove, and then pour the flavoured cream through a sieve into the melted chocolate. Stir thoroughly to combine, and place in the fridge for around fifteen minutes. Using a teaspoon, make small balls of the truffle mixture, which could be dredged with a good cocoa powder, icing sugar and/or spice. Return to the fridge to set, and eat within 48 hours.
Patrick’s Guanaja Chocolate and Armagnac Mousse
This recipe comes from Patrick Williams, who runs the award-winning Patrick’s Kitchen in The Goods Shed, a daily farmers’ market and restaurant in Canterbury, England. Patrick makes and sells about four batches of this each week, and it is deservedly popular. A respectful use for really good chocolate!
300 g chocolate, 70% Guanaja or similar
300 g unsalted butter, finely chopped
6 medium eggs, separated
6 egg whites
70 g caster sugar
40 ml (a good shot) of Armagnac (optional)
Cautiously melt the chocolate and butter pieces over slow simmering water in a metal or glass bowl. When it is melted, take off the heat.
Put the egg yolks, 60 g sugar, splash of water in another bowl. Place this bowl over a pan of fast-boiling water and whisk the contents together until the mixture is pale and thickened. Remove from the heat, and whisk in the Armagnac. (The aim is to get the chocolate mixture and egg yolk mixture to a similar temperature for Step 3.)
Softly whisk the egg yolk mixture into the melted chocolate, mixing gently but thoroughly, including the edges of the bowl.
In a clean, dry bowl, whisk the egg whites (by hand or machine) with a pinch of salt. When they form soft peaks, add the remaining sugar and continue whisking. (The sugar helps the egg white to stiffen slightly.)
Lightly whisk a third of the egg whites in to the chocolate mixture to lighten it. Fold in the remaining egg whites carefully and thoroughly, taking care to lift the melted chocolate at the bottom of the bowl. (This maintains consistency across the entire batch.)
Spoon carefully into about 8 small ramekins, or one large bowl, and chill, preferably overnight.
Eat within a couple of days.
References
1 Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London, 1996), p. 22.
2 Marcy Norton, ‘Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics’, American Historical Review (June 2006), pp. 660–91.
3 Robert Latham, ed., Diary of Samuel Pepys (Berkeley, CA, 2000), vol. III, p. 182.
4 Marquis de Sade, Lettres à sa femme, ed. Marc Buffat (Brussels, 1997), p. 327 (my translation).
5 Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford, 1995), p. 243 .
Select Bibliography
Books
Brown, Peter B., In Praise of Hot Liquors: The Study of Chocolate, Coffee and Tea-Drinking 1600–1850 (York, 1995)
Clarence-Smith, William Gervase, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914 (London, 2000)
Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London, 1996)
Cox, Cat, Chocolate Unwrapped: The Politics of Pleasure (London, 2003)
Doutre-Roussel, Chloé, The Chocolate Connoisseur: For Everyone with a Passion for Chocolate (London, 2005)
Foster, Nelson, and Linda S. Cordell, eds, Chillies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World (Tucson, AZ, 1996)
Harwich, Nikita, Histoire du Chocolat (Paris, 1992)
Knapp, A. W., Cocoa and Chocolate: Their Historyfrom Plantation to Consumer (London, 1920)
Lopez, Ruth, Chocolate: The Nature of Indulgence (New York, 2002)
Off, Carol, Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet (Toronto, 2007)
Richardson, Paul, Indulgence: One Man’s Selfless Search for the Best Chocolate in the World (London, 2003)
Satre, Lowell J., Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business (Athens, OH, 2005)
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants (New York, 1993)
Szogyi, Alex, ed., Chocolate, Food of the Gods (Westport, CT, 1997)
Terrio, Susan J., Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate (Berkeley, CA, 2000)
Young, Allen M., The Chocolate Tree: A Natural History of Cacao (Washington, DC, 1994)
Articles and Journals
Special issue on chocolate, Food and Foodways: Explorations in the Culture and History of Human Nourishment, XV (2007)
Few, Martha, ‘Chocolate, Sex and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala’, Ethnohistory, LII/4 (Fall 2005), pp. 673–87
Laudan, Rachel, and Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ‘Chiles, Chocolate and Race in New Spain: Glancing Backward to New Spain or Looking Forward to Mexico?’, Eighteenth-Century Life, XXIII (May 1999), pp. 59–70
Norton, Marcy, ‘Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics’, American Historical Review (June 2006), pp. 660–91
Prufer, Keith M., and W. Jeffrey Hurst, ‘Chocolate in the Underworld Space of Death: Cacao Seeds from an Early Classic Mortuary Cave’, Ethnohistory, LIV/2 (Spring 2007), pp. 273–301
Websites and Associations
Chocolate History
The Chocolate Research Por
tal https://cocoaknow.ucdavis.edu/ChocolateResearch
Cocoa Reworks: Memories of Rowntree www.cocoareworks.co.uk
Borthwick Institute, University of York http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/bihr/guideleaflets/womens/women_doc6_rowntree.htm
Chocolate Campaigns
Stop Chocolate Slavery http://vision.ucsd.edu/~kbranson/stopchocolateslavery/goodchocolateproducts.html
International Labour Rights Forum’s Cocoa Campaign www.laborrights.org/stop-child-labor/cocoa-campaign
Be Treatwise campaign www.betreatwise.org.uk
Chocolate Firms
Amedei
www.amedei.com/jspamedei/index.jsp
Bloomsberry
www.bloomsberry.com
Bonnat
www.bonnat-chocolatier.com
Côte d’Or
www.cotedor.com
Seattle ‘Chick chocolate’
www.chickchocolates.com
Tony’s Chocolonely
www.chocolonely.com
Valrhona
www.valrhona.com
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Max and Tobias for patience in chocolate shops, and to Anthony for pretending to believe that all the chocolate was there for professional reasons.
Sarah Moss
Thanks to Linda McGavigan for kindly opening up her own private stock of chocolate lore from Trinidad; Margaret and Norman MacDonald for opening up their vast stores of knowledge; Frank Schipper and Judith Schueler for sharing bits of Dutch chocolate lore, Emma Robertson for pointing out (and creating) the cocoa reworks project; Sara Slinn at the Borthwick Institute in York for her help and patience with sourcing photos; Edith Badenoch for the cowboy cookie recipe.
