The Sigla Blog

As promised in my mini anti-Valentine’s rant, here’s a piece a wrote for the current issue of Food and Wine Magazine called ‘Chocolate: The lore, the legend, the lies’.

Valentine’s Day, depending on your viewpoint, is either the most romantic day of the year or a bumper bonanza for florists and card-manufacturers. While some of us will endure petrol station chrysanthemums or insipid mass-produced verse, “Anythingâ€?, as Jo Brand once said, “is good if it’s made of chocolateâ€?. No other foodstuff has been romanticised, obsessed over and had poems written about it, as much as chocolate. It even claims the lofty feat of making people feel like they’re in love. So what is the mysterious past of this dark, velvet beauty?

With all its charm and worth, chocolate once had a value all its own . literally. For the first people who discovered it, the Aztecs in South America, it had many uses, including as currency. They also drank it as a cold beverage, flavouring it with chilli, vanilla or pimento to form a spicy drink that was thought to be an antidote to tiredness. The drink, called “xocoatlâ€? gets its name from the Nahuatl Aztec word for “bitter waterâ€?. Residue discovered in a Mayan teapot suggests that Mayans were drinking chocolate 2,600 years ago, the earliest record of cacao use. Chocolate’s magical associations have their beginnings here, as the Aztecs linked it to Xochiquetzal, the Goddess of fertility and believed it was a gift from the God Quetzalcoatl, who brought the cacao tree seeds from heaven and showed his people how to make chocolate.

Quality chocolate oozes opulence and the present day pedestal we’ve awarded the chunky substance is far from its modest beginnings. Everyone knows it’s made from the bean of the cacao tree but it’s the sparse yield from mature blossoms that adds to the enigma of chocolate. Each evergreen cacao tree produces about 6,000 blossoms, only 3-10% of which will actually bear fruit . and it takes 400 beans just to make a single pound of chocolate. Christopher Columbus encountered the beans on his fourth visit to South America but was more interested in finding India than the bitter drink. Chocolate eventually came to Europe when a more forward-thinking explorer, Hernando Cortez, recognised its commercial potential and returned to Spain with his bounty and the equipment for making it in to chocolatl (“warm liquidâ€?). While we take the prevalence of chocolate for granted, this chocolatl was bitter to taste & wasn’t popular . until Cortez hit upon the idea of sweetening it with sugar. Unbelievably, Spain managed to keep this a secret for almost a century.

Without losing ourselves in a fudge of chocolate history, Spain, once the dominant force in chocolate for almost two hundred years, was lagging behind the US, Great Britain, France and leading manufacture Germany by 1900. As the 20th century wore on, another country would usurp Germany’s position . Switzerland. These days the Swiss and the Belgians top of the chocolate pyramid and the global chocolate industry is worth billions.

So why are we so obsessed with the stuff? Is it, as some chocolate fiends would have us believe, ridiculously addictive? Technically, no, although heroin addicts have cited a penchant for chocolate because it releases dopamine, a mild opiate, in the brain. Perhaps, along with oysters and strawberries, it’s an aphrodisiac, which would explain why it has become such a popular Valentine’s Day gift. The sheer pleasure of eating chocolate and its melting qualities (its melting point is just below human body temperature) makes it the number one ingredient in edible body paint. Science has yet to prove its ardurous quality, but chocolate impacts on our serotonin levels and contains phenethylamine (PEA). Both are so-called ‘happy’ chemicals and mild stimulants producing anything from the feeling of being in love to the good stuff in sunlight. This theory is backed up in John Milton’s The Devils Advocate, which claims: “Biochemically, love is just like eating large amounts of chocolateâ€?.

Surprisingly, the largest producers of chocolate (The Swiss) are also the biggest consumers. Per head per capita, they scoff their way through 22 pounds each as opposed to 11 pounds in the US. Does that mean they’re the happiest nation on earth too?

Because of its sweet reputation, there is a misconception that chocolate has no nutritional value. Solid chocolate is a big source of both copper and magnesium and is a valuable energy source. Camping books always suggest including a bar with supplies for emergencies and it’s rumoured Napoleon carried chocolate with him during battle. During World War II, the U.S. government allocated specific shipping space for importing cocoa beans to manufacture chocolate bars for troops, given their nutritional and morale qualities. To this day, the US Army includes chocolate bars in rations and Astronauts have eaten it in orbit as an energy source.

Apart from its obvious pick-me-up quality, chocolate can be beneficial to health: dark chocolate is rich in antioxidants that can prevent cancer and aid the heart and blood vessels. One such, are flavonoids, and dark chocolate is said to contain larger amounts of them than red wine, green tea, and blueberries. Two of the biggest, and unflattering myths about chocolate are that it is the cause of headaches and acne, neither of which has ever been proved. There’s no doubt consuming large amounts of chocolate is bad for your teeth and waistline, but Mars in the US are spending millions of dollars researching synthesized cocoa flavanol molecules, claiming that cocoa-based prescription drugs may help in the fight against diabetes and dementia.

Throughout the ages, chocolate has acquired a glamour and sinfulness of its own. The French Court adopted the custom of drinking chocolate after the Spanish princess Anna married Louis XIII. It remained a drink of the nobility for decades but its decadence wasn’t wasted on the Church. In the 17th century Pope Pius V (who claimed to hate the drink) declared that it did not interfere with Catholic fasting rituals and could still be imbibed. In the early 18th century, Frederick I of Prussia imposed a tax on chocolate, which reinforces its status as a luxury.

Mass manufacturers Fry’s can trace their chocolate credentials right back to their founder Joseph Fry, who made the first ‘eating’ chocolate. He was followed shortly by two brothers who would go on to become one of the biggest chocolate manufacturers in the world, Cadbury. From Joseph Fry’s first bar in 1847, chocolate has joined coffee and orange juice as one of the most mass-produced food commodities in the world. These days, mass-produced brand names co-exist with expensive handmade luxury chocolate providing a spectrum of quality (and price) not seen with other foods.

Many self-medicating choc fiends are proud of their chocoholic tendencies but science disproves that it is addictive. Chocolate contains the fairly weak stimulant theobromine so the most you can hope for is a chocolate kick similar to a caffeine buzz (worth combining the two maybe?).

If you bought your pet pooch one of those doggie Christmas stockings, you may have noticed how insipid and chalky-looking the dog chocolate drops were. They’re specially made for canines but we assume they’re far inferior to the last square of Dairy Milk we’ve thrown our mutt, when they do their doe-eyed routine. However, many people refuse to believe that our beloved chocolate is harmful to pets. In fact, it is because it contains theobromine, which dogs, cats and horses cannot break down sufficiently. If fed chocolate, the chemical stays in their system for up to 20 hours and can be very harmful. Who’d have thought something so delectable could possibly have any negative traits?

In the ultimate reversal, chocolate has consumed us; transfixed us with its speckled squares and soft centres. It is the ebony silk that melts in the mouth, the ultimate comfort food, and the confectionary of choice for our break-up stories. It has been immortalised in films with Willa Wonka and The Chocolate Factory the ultimate gluttonous fantasy. In Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, a nomadic chocolatier reignites a town’s passions with her recipes. Even the splattered blood from the legendary shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, was actually chocolate syrup. The first book exclusively about chocolate was published in 1609 in Mexico. The fact that a book - Libro en el cual se trata del chocolate . was published 400 years ago on the topic epitomizes our long love affair with ‘bitter water’.