Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
Did you know that today is World Chocolate Day, 7 July 1550 supposedly being when chocolate was first introduced to Europe? This gives me an excuse to revisit Joanne Harris’s delightful novel Chocolat.
The novel is an assault on ascetic Christianity, with the owner of a chocolate shop in southwestern France pitted against the village’s Catholic priest. (Perhaps afraid to offend fundamentalists, the movie version of Chocolat pulls its religious punches, with an incoherent conflict the result.) Desiring that his parishioners give up all sensual delights for Lent, Father Reynaud regards Vivianne Rocher as an emissary of the devil. Chocolate, in his eyes, is a pagan concoction, which it so happens is how Vivianne regards it as well.
But because he is so repressed, we get some of the most vivid descriptions of Vivianne’s chocolate shop from him. As I’m celebrating chocolate by sharing some of Harris’s scrumptious passages, here’s one of him describing La Praline:
I looked into the display window this morning. On a white marble shelf are aligned innumerable boxes, packages, cornets of silver and gold paper, rosettes, bells, flowers, hearts, and long curls of multicolored ribbon. In glass bells and dishes lie the chocolates, the pralines, Venus’s nipples, truffles, mendiants, candied fruits, hazelnut clusters, chocolate seashells, candied rose petals, sugared violets… Protected from the sun by the half-blind that shields them, they gleam darkly, like sunken treasure, Aladdin’s cave of sweet clichés. And in the middle she has built a magnificent centerpiece. A gingerbread house, walls of chocolate-coated pain d’épices with the detail piped on in silver and gold icing, roof tiles of florentines studded with crystallized fruits, strange vines of icing and chocolate growing up the walls, marzipan birds singing in chocolate trees… And the witch herself, dark chocolate from the top of her pointed hat to the hem of her long cloak half-astride a broomstick that is in reality a giant guimauve, the long twisted marshmallows that dangle from the stalls of sweet-vendors on carnival days…
One of Vivianne’s business secrets is her ability to match up her chocolates with her clientele. She says she gets it from her mother, a wandering fortune teller:
I know all their favorites. It’s a knack, a professional secret, like a fortune teller reading palms….I like their small and introverted concerns. I can read their eyes, their mouths, so easily- this one with its hint of bitterness will relish my zesty orange twists; this sweet-smiling one the soft-centered apricot hearts; this girl with the windblown hair will love the mendiants; this brisk, cheery woman the chocolate brazils. For Guillaume, the florentines, eaten neatly over a saucer in his tidy bachelor’s house. Narcisse’s appetite for double-chocolate truffles reveals the gentle heart beneath the gruff exterior. Caroline Clairmont will dream of cinder toffee tonight and wake hungry and irritable. And the children… Chocolate curls, white buttons with colored vermicelli, pain d’épices with gilded edging, marzipan fruits in their nests of ruffled paper, peanut brittle, clusters, cracknells, assorted misshapes in half-kilo boxes… I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crash-crash-crashing among the hazels and nougatines….
For Vivianne, making chocolate involves a magic that goes back centuries to the Americas:
There is a kind of alchemy in the transformation of base chocolate into this wise Fool’s Gold, a layman’s magic that even my mother might have relished. As I work, I clear my mind, breathing deeply. The windows are open, and the through draft would be cold if it were not for the heat of the stoves, the copper pans, the rising vapor from the melting couverture. The mingled scents of chocolate, vanilla, heated copper, and cinnamon are intoxicating, powerfully suggestive; the raw and earthy tang of the Americas, the hot and resinous perfume of the rain forest. This is how I travel now, as the Aztecs did in their sacred rituals: Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia. The court of Montezuma. Cortez and Columbus. The Food of the Gods, bubbling and frothing in ceremonial goblets. The bitter elixir of life.
The book opens on Mardi Gras and concludes on Easter with a great chocolate festival. In between, Vivianne must struggle not only with the ascetic priest and his narrow vision of Lent but also with anti-gypsy sentiments (their version of our anti-immigrant prejudices) and tyrannical patriarchy. Her chocolate calls upon the world to be more open, more accepting, and more joyful.
Her victory occurs on Easter eve when the priest, maddened by the temptation, breaks into the shop to destroy it, only to gorge himself instead on the candy. Caught out by his congregation, he flees and his hold on the town is broken. First, however, we get his rich description of the special Easter display that is meant to greet the town the following morning. I quote liberally so that you can lose yourself in his sense of wonder:
It is an amazement of riches, glacé fruits and marzipan flowers and mountains of loose chocolates of all shapes and colors, and rabbits, ducks, hens, chicks, lambs, gazing out at me with merry-grave chocolate eyes like the terra-cotta armies of ancient China, and above it all a statue of a woman, graceful brown arms holding a sheaf of chocolate wheat, hair rippling. The detail is beautifully rendered, the hair added in a darker grade of chocolate, the eyes brushed on in white. The smell of chocolate is overwhelming, the rich fleshly scent of it drags down the throat in an exquisite trail of sweetness….
The air is hot and rich with the scent of chocolate. Quite unlike the white powdery chocolate I knew as a boy, this has a throaty richness like the perfumed beans from the coffee stall on the market, a redolence of amaretto and tiramisù, a smoky, burned flavor that enters my mouth somehow and makes it water. There is a silver jug of the stuff on the counter, from which a vapor rises. I recall that I have not breakfasted this morning….
My hand lingers in spite of itself; a hovering dragonfly above a cluster of dainties. A Plexiglas tray with a lid protects them; the name of each piece is lettered on the lid in fine, cursive script. The names are entrancing: Bitter orange cracknell. Apricot marzipan roll. Cerisette russe. White rum truffle. Manon blanc. Nipples of Venus. I feel myself flushing beneath the mask. How could anyone order something with a name like that? And yet they look wonderful, plumply white in the light of my torch, tipped with darker chocolate. I take one from the top of the tray. I hold it beneath my nose; it smells of cream and vanilla. No one will know. I realize that I have not eaten chocolate since I was a boy, more years ago than I can remember, and even then it was a cheap grade of chocolat à croquer, fifteen percent cocoa solids- twenty for the dark- with a sticky aftertaste of fat and sugar. Once or twice I bought Süchard from the supermarket, but at five times the price of the other, it was a luxury I could seldom afford. This is different altogether; the brief resistance of the chocolate shell as it meets the lips, the soft truffle inside…. There are layers of flavor like the bouquet of a fine wine, a slight bitterness, a richness like ground coffee; warmth brings the flavor to life, and it fills my nostrils, a taste succubus that has me moaning….
Again I linger over the names. Crème de cassis. Three nut cluster. I select a dark nugget from a tray marked Eastern Journey. Crystallized ginger in a hard sugar shell, releasing a mouthful of liqueur like a concentration of spices, a breath of aromatic air where sandalwood and cinnamon and lime vie for attention with cedar and allspice… I take another, from a tray marked Pêche au miel millefleurs. A slice of peach steeped in honey and eau-de-vie, a crystallized peach sliver on the chocolate lid.
Be kind to yourself today and treat yourself to your favorite brand of chocolate. World Chocolate Day demands it.