Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

  —M.K.

  Chocolate and Its Origins

  The men who first assaulted the frontiers of America were driven there by the hunger for gold. At that time, almost all the known values were in terms of minerals; agriculture and commerce were in their infancy, and political economy had not yet been born. The Spaniards, therefore, hunted in the New World for precious metals, since found to be almost sterile in that they depreciate as they multiply, and in that we have discovered many other more active means of adding to the main body of wealth.

  But those far countries, where sunshine of every degree makes the fields burst with richness, were found perfect for the cultivation of sugar and coffee; they also hid, it was disclosed, the first potatoes, indigo plants, vanilla, quinine, cocoa, and so forth; and it is these which were the true treasures.

  If these discoveries have taken place in spite of the barriers erected by a suspicious nation, it is reasonable to hope they will be multiplied in the years to come, and that the researches carried on by the scholars of old Europe will enrich the Three Powers with a multitude of substances which will give us entirely new sensations, just as vanilla has already done, or which will add to our alimentary resources, like cocoa.

  Sylvia Plachy, Chocolate Cake, 1991

  We have come to think of chocolate as the mixture which results from roasting together the cacao bean with sugar and cinnamon: such is the classic definition. Sugar is an integral part of it; for with cacao alone we can only make a cocoa paste and not chocolate. And when we add the delicious perfume of vanilla to this mixture of sugar, cacao, and cinnamon, we achieve the ne plus ultra of perfection to which such a concoction may be carried.

  It is thus to a small number of ingredients that taste and experience have reduced the things which have been mixed with cacao, such as pepper, pimento, anis, ginger, and so on, each of which has been tried out successively.

  The cacao plant is native to South America; it is found both on the islands and on the continent; but by now it is agreed that the trees which give the best fruit are those which flourish along the shores near Maracaibo, in the valleys of Caracas, and in the rich province of Soconusco. There the pod is larger, the sugar less bitter, and the aroma more refined. Since the time when these lands became less inaccessible, such comparisons have been made whenever wished, and skilled palates have not been misled by them.

  The Spanish ladies of the New World are madly addicted to chocolate, to such a point that, not content to drink it several times each day, they even have it served to them in church. This sensuality has often brought down upon them the wrath of their bishops; but the latter have ended by closing their eyes to the sin, and the Reverend Father Escobar, whose spiritual reasoning was as subtle as his moral doctrine was accommodating, issued a formal declaration that chocolate made with water was not contrary to the rules of fast days, even evoking (to the profit of his penitents), the time-worn adage. Liquidum non frangit jejunium.

  Chocolate was brought into Spain during the seventeenth century, and it immediately became popular because of its extremely strong flavor, which was appreciated by women and especially by monks. Fashion has not changed in this respect; and even today, on the Peninsula, chocolate is served whenever there is any reason for offering refreshments.

  It was carried over the mountain frontiers with Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III and wife of Louis XIII. Spanish monks, too, made it known by the presents which they sent to their French brothers. The various ambassadors from Spain to Paris also helped make chocolate fashionable, and at the beginning of the Regency it was more commonly known than coffee, since it was drunk as a pleasant aliment, while coffee was still thought of as a luxurious and rare beverage.

  It is common knowledge that Linnaeus called cocoa cacao theobroma (drink of the gods). It has always been wondered why he gave it such a strong title: some people have attributed it to his own passionate love for the drink; others to his wish to please his confessor; still others to his gallantry, since it was his queen who was the first to introduce it to common usage.

  Properties of Chocolate

  Chocolate has given rise to profound dissertations whose purpose was to determine its nature and its properties and to place it properly in the category of hot, cold, or temperate foods; and it must be admitted that these written documents have done little to set forth the truth.

  But with time and experience, those two sublime teachers, it has been shown as proof positive that carefully prepared chocolate is as healthful a food as it is pleasant; that it is nourishing and easily digested; that it does not cause the same harmful effects to feminine beauty which are blamed on coffee, but is on the contrary a remedy for them; that it is above all helpful to people who must do a great deal of mental work, to those who labor in the pulpit or the courtroom, and especially to travellers; that it has produced good results in cases of chronic illness, and that it has even been used as the last resource in diseases of the pylorus.

  Chocolate owes these different properties to the fact that, being in truth no more than eleosaccharum, there are few substances that contain more nourishing particles for a like weight: all of which makes it almost completely assimilable.

  During the last war cacao was scarce, and above all very expensive: we busied ourselves in finding a substitute for it; but all our efforts were fruitless, and one of the blessings of peace has been to rid us of the various brews which we were forced to taste out of politeness, and which had no more to do with chocolate than chicory has to do with real mocha coffee.

  Some people complain that they cannot digest chocolate; some, on the other hand, insist that it does not satisfy them and that it digests too quickly.

  It is quite possible that the first have only themselves to blame, and that the chocolate they use is either of inferior quality or badly prepared; for good well-made chocolate can be assimilated by any stomach which can still digest even feebly.

  As to the others, the remedy is easy: they should fortify themselves at breakfast with a little meat pie, a cutlet, or a skewered kidney; then they should drink down a good bowl of the best Soconusco chocolate, and they would find themselves thanking God for their supraperfect digestive systems.

  This gives me a chance here to put down an observation the correctness of which may be counted on:

  When you have breakfasted well and fully, if you will drink a big cup of chocolate at the end you will have digested the whole perfectly three hours later, and you will still be able to dine.… Because of my scientific enthusiasm and the sheer force of my eloquence I have persuaded a number of ladies to try this, although they were convinced it would kill them; they have always found themselves in fine shape indeed, and have not forgotten to give the Professor his rightful due.

  People who habitually drink chocolate enjoy unvarying health, and are least attacked by a host of little illnesses which can destroy the true joy of living; their physical weight is almost stationary: these are two advantages which anyone can verify among his acquaintanceship and especially among his friends who follow this diet.

  Here is the proper place to speak of the properties of chocolate drunk with amber, which I myself have checked over a long period of time, and the result of which experiments I am proud to offer to my readers.

  Very well then: if any man has drunk a little too deeply from the cup of physical pleasure; if he has spent too much time at his desk that should have been spent asleep; if his fine spirits have temporarily become dulled; if he finds the air too damp, the minutes too slow, and the atmosphere too heavy to withstand; if he is obsessed by a fixed idea which bars him from any freedom of thought: if he is any of these poor creatures, we say, let him be given a good pint of amber-flavored chocolate, in the proportions of sixty to seventy-two grains of amber to a pound, and marvels will be performed.

  In my own particular way of designating things I call ambered chocolate chocolate of the unhappy, since, in each one of the various physical or mental states which I have o
utlined, there is a common but indefinable ground of suffering, which is like unhappiness.

  Difficulties in Making Good Chocolate

  In Spain, chocolate is excellently made; but we have almost given up importing it because it is not uniform in quality and when inferior material is imported we are forced to use it as it comes to us.

  Italian chocolates are not at all to the French taste; in general the cacao is over-roasted, which makes the beverage bitter and without nourishment, since a part of the nut itself has been turned into ash.

  Since chocolate has come into common usage in France, everyone has been taught how to make it; but few people have really mastered the art, which is far from an easy one.

  First of all it is necessary to be able to tell good cacao from bad, and to be determined to use it in its purest form, for there are inferior samples in even the best boxes of it, and a careless merchant often lets bruised kernels slip by, which his conscience should make him reject. Then the roasting of the cacao is still another delicate operation; it demands a certain feeling for it which must border on inspiration. There are roasters who are born with this instinct, and are infallible.

  Then a special talent is needed for the proper regulation of the amount of sugar which must enter into the mixture; it cannot be fixed in routine and inflexible proportions, but varies according to the intensity of flavor of each lot of cacao beans and the point at which the roasting is stopped.

  Pounding and mixing both demand special care, as well, since upon them depends the digestibility of the chocolate.

  Other considerations must govern the choice and amount of flavoring, which cannot be the same for chocolates meant to be used as food and those meant to be eaten as delicacies. This flavoring must also be adjusted to whether or not vanilla has been added to the mixture. The net result is that, in order to make a truly exquisite chocolate, countless subtle equations must be solved, from which we benefit without even having been conscious of them.

  For some time now machines have been used for the making of chocolate; we do not feel that this method adds anything to the quality of the product, but certainly it lessens the handwork, and those manufacturers who have adopted it should be able to sell their product at much lower prices. Nevertheless they manage to dispose of it at even higher ones, a fact which makes it only too clear that the true commercial spirit has not yet appeared in France; for, rightly applied, the facility of production realized by machinery ought to prove profitable to both merchant and buyer.

  As a lover of chocolate I have fairly well run the gamut of local purveyors, and have finally chosen M. Debauve, Rue des Saints-Pères 26, chocolatemaker to the king, thanking heaven meanwhile that such regal favor has fallen so rightly.

  It is not too astonishing: M. Debauve, a highly distinguished pharmacist, brings to the manufacture of his chocolates the skills which he acquired through long study in a much wider sphere.

  People who have not worked at a certain subject, no matter what it may be, have no conception of the difficulties which must be overcome to attain perfection in it, nor how much attention, instinct, and experience are necessary to produce, for instance, a chocolate which is sweet without being insipid, strong but not bitter, aromatic but not unwholesome, and thick but not grainy.

  Such are the chocolates of M. Debauve: they owe their supremacy to a good choice of materials, to a stern vow that nothing inferior ever come from his factory, and to the master’s eye which sees to every detail in production.

  M. Debauve, moreover, as an enlightened pharmacist, has succeeded in offering to his numerous clients some pleasant remedies for certain sickly tendencies.

  Thus, to those who are too thin he suggests the use of a restorative chocolate with salep; to highly nervous people, antispasmodic chocolate flavored with orange-flower water; to irritable souls, chocolate with milk of almond; to which list he will undoubtedly add my chocolate of the unhappy, well prepared with amber secundum artem.

  But his main merit is to offer to us, at a moderate price, an excellent average-priced chocolate, from which we can make a good breakfast; which will delight us, at dinner, in custards; and which will still please us, at the end of the evening, in the ices and little cakes and other delicacies of the drawing room, without even mentioning the amusing distraction of pastilles and crackers, with or without mottoes.

  We know M. Debauve only by his products; we have never seen him; but we do know that he helps mightily to free France from the tribute which she used to pay to Spain, in that he provides both Paris and the provinces with a chocolate whose reputation does not cease to grow. We also know that every day he receives more orders from beyond our borders; it is therefore because of this fact, and as a charter member of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, that we make here this mention and this recommendation of him, of which it will soon be seen that we are not too generous.

  Official Way of Making Chocolate

  Americans make their chocolate without sugar. When they wish to drink it, they have boiling water brought to them; then each person grates into his cup the amount of cacao he wishes, pours the hot water over it, and adds sugar and flavoring according to his own tastes.

  This method appeals neither to our manners nor to our preferences, and here in France we like to have chocolate served to us all prepared.

  Transcendental chemistry has taught us that it should neither be grated with a scraper nor ground with a pestle, since the dry friction which results in either case turns part of the sugar into starch, and makes the beverage less flavorsome.

  Therefore, to make chocolate, that is to say to make it ready for immediate use, about an ounce and a half should be taken for each cup, and then dissolved slowly in water as it heats, stirring the whole meanwhile with a wooden spatula; it should boil then for fifteen minutes, so that the solution takes on a certain thickness, and then be served very hot.

  “Monsieur,” Madame d’Arestel, Superior of the convent of the Visitation at Belley, once said to me more than fifty years ago, “whenever you want to have a really good cup of chocolate, make it the day before, in a porcelain coffeepot, and let it set. The night’s rest will concentrate it and give it a velvety quality which will make it better. Our good God cannot possibly take offense at this little refinement, since he himself is everything that is most perfect.”

  —from The Physiology of Taste, 1825,

  translated from the French by M.F.K. Fisher

  ALICE B. TOKLAS ON HOT CHOCOLATE

  The luxury hotel at Nîmes was in a sad way. The proprietor had been killed at the war, the chef was mobilised, the food was poor and monotonous. Aunt Pauline had been militarised and so could be requisitioned for any use connected with the wounded. Gertrude Stein evacuated the wounded who came into Nîmes on the ambulance trains. Material from our unit organised and supplied a small first-aid operating room. The Red Cross nuns in the best French manner served in large bowls to the wounded piping

  Hot Chocolate

  3 ozs. melted chocolate to I quart hot milk. Bring to a boil and simmer for ½ hour. Then beat for 5 minutes. The nuns made huge quantities in copper cauldrons, so that the whisk they used was huge and heavy. We all took turns in beating.

  —from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, 1954

  JAMES BEARD ON HOT CHOCOLATE

  A steaming cup of hot chocolate with buttered toast is surely one of the most heart-warming, body-warming, and taste-satisfying combinations known to man. When I was growing up in Portland, Oregon, my friends and I used to go to a great place called Swetland’s where we would sit and sip some of the most luscious thick hot chocolate I have ever tasted.

  Later on, when I visited France for the first time as a young man, I found the French breakfasting on enormous cups of hot chocolate with buttery croissants or good rolls and butter, an enchanting marriage of flavors. It wasn’t only the taste of the chocolate but also the way it was served in the old days that was so nice—I remember that at Maillard’s, on M
adison Avenue in New York, you drank it from delightful white porcelain cups that had “hot chocolate” lettered on the sides. Some of those old chocolate cups and mugs were really works of art.

  All that seems to have faded away, and it is just too bad. Chocolate now has become something that is tipped out of a little paper bag into a cup, dissolved with hot water, and served with artificial whipped cream or a marshmallow stuck on top. This is not hot chocolate, and it really pains me to think that a whole generation is growing up never knowing the glories of a truly well made cup of hot chocolate.

  Chocolate, as you undoubtedly know, was one of the greatest gifts of the New World to the Old. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico, they found some of Montezuma’s courtiers drinking as many as fifty cups of chocolate a day. In fact, it has been surmised that Montezuma’s love of chocolate occasioned the first chocolate ice cream—runners were sent to the mountains to bring back snow over which the whipped chocolate was poured. Personally, I think that is stretching history a bit, but it is an amusing, if apocryphal, story.

  Since those days, chocolate has always been popular in Europe, and it is still drunk a lot in France and Vienna and throughout Central Europe, although the British tend to favor its less elegant relative, cocoa. Cocoa and chocolate often get confused, probably because both come from the cacao bean. Chocolate is made from the dried, roasted, and crushed “nibs” of the bean, which yield a thick liquid very high in cocoa fat. This is partially defatted, cooled, and solidified into a block of unsweetened chocolate, the type used for baking (semisweet baking chocolate has some sugar added).

  Cocoa is a powdered form of chocolate with practically all the fat removed, so it is much lower in calories.