South East Asia, Before the Chocolate

A couple of weekends ago in Hanoi (only an hour-and-a-half flight from Guangzhou), my uncle asked me if I ever write about my travels.  The question struck me because writing about my travels is one of the things that, when asked, I claim to do for a living, and because Vietnam is even the country where, a dozen years ago, I began to undertake travels that could be chronicled.  But you (and my uncle) might not know that, since there is no record in any mainstream publication of my ever having been to any of the countries in the current Association of South East Asian Nations.  Why?  Well, as I write in a poem that was just published this week (a proud first), the reasons are many.  Sometimes I prefer to just read a book.  Or write a poem.  Tangle myself in the lusty pursuits of the human soul.  Or get back to the work I'm being paid to do and grade papers.  Or throw myself uncomfortably onto the couch to contemplate the lack of insulation in my apartment and the accumulation of allergens on the blanket that I'm using to do the job while watching several uninterrupted episodes of The Wire on pirated DVDs.  Anyway, I'm ambivalent about "travel writing," which, as I had the wonderful occasion recently to discuss with the English professor to whom I had first submitted my own travel stories as a student on Semester at Sea in 1999, is predicated on the antiquated cultural notion that what is strange to you is ipso facto universally strange; and once an author disabuses herself of that faulty logic, she must reconsider her research and file the work under a new category (journalism, say, or memoir; anthropology, maybe, or confession).  Or acknowledge that there's no there there--which is not such a terrible thing.  That emptiness, vastness, confusion is often why we travel in the first place--to be foreign, to get away, to lose ourselves.  That's a wonderful pursuit.  One of my favorites.  I'm just dubious of the instinct many travelers have to write with authority about the very thing within which they are lost.  In 1999, I invoked "the uncertain tree-lined streets that frame latter-day mythology about colonial Saigon" in one of my first travel stories.  Like many 21st century travel writers, I have continued to question the biases and motives of travelers from my part of the world while at the same time participating in them, projecting them, with my very presence, back onto parts of the world that are not my own.  That is the trap we have constructed for ourselves, and for a while now the trap itself has made for an interesting topic of inquiry (I particularly enjoy what Claude Levi-Strauss did with it in Tristes Tropiques).


And until I figure out how to get out of the trap entirely, here are the items and encounters that have most impressed themselves on my memory over twelve years of travel in Southeast Asia:


1.  Van Cong Tu's Hanoi street-food tour and the discreet bourgeois charm of Tu's shiny white Vespa (you can jump on the back if you're touring solo).


2.  On the topic of the bourgeoisie, everything about the Metropole hotel in Hanoi, especially the Vietnamese cooking class and the perfectly grilled steaks, heavy French sauces, and artichoke stuffed with mustard-seed-spiced cauliflower salad in the bistro facing the street.


3.  The mystery of Saigon, which had about one and a half tall buildings when I visited in 1999 and now, I hear, looks likes Singapore or Hong Kong, though the miraculously delicate spring-roll dipping sauce made from other ingredients mixed into incredibly pungent fermented fish sauce is as good as ever.


4.  Pho.


5.  The fruit.  Everywhere, the fruit.


6.  The combination of Buddhist ethics, creative spirits, and fragrant herbs, resulting in phenomenal restaurants that train street kids for jobs in hospitality: Koto and Hoa Sua in Hanoi; Makphet in Vientiane.


7. Everything about Vientiane.


8.  Riding away from the inevitable sensory overload of Angkor Wat, on the back of a moped, into the gentle dusty landscape and weaving between with blue houses on stilts.


9.  Dialogue in and about Burma/Myanmar.


10.  Vatch Bhumichitr La Bhu Salah guest house: combination art retreat, culinary indulgence, and friend's holiday house.


11. The oil massages and stir-fried noodles you get every day on a beach vacation in Thailand: simple, easy, never less than good, and you don't have to settle up until you leave at the end of the week.


12.  The "tent experience" at Relax Bay on Koh Lanta in Thailand (or so I imagine whenever I think about planning a trip there).

(The photos here are mine and other people's, accumulated over time.)




Still to come on Chocolate in Context: Vietnamese bean-to-bar chocolate makers.

Chocolate Vacation Planning: Touring Mesoamerica

The conflict of course is not whether or not Hamlet’s uncle killed his father, but whether the conflicted young heir identifies with his wronged father or his usurping uncle.  And here in China, though this vastly incomprehensible place (more irksomely incomprehensible than any country else I have visited in Asia or the world) frustrates me to the point of palpable brattiness, I am enormously more happy than I would ever be in any midsized American city.  The irony is all.  And the enduring irony of the story of chocolate—which has sustained my interest and my commitment to writing this blog even when I’m geographically separated from or otherwise abstaining from eating fine chocolate—is that the region responsible from bringing chocolate production and its accompanying mythology into the world is today one of the least significant regions in the global chocolate industry and often the least associated with chocolate.

A couple of weeks ago, I received, in the span of a couple of days, two enticing offers to tangle myself in chocolate's roots in Mexico.

The first message read "EMILY GYAL!!! I been trying to find you! You still interested in Mexico???? We are planning to leave on Saturday, the 30th--- going til Nov 5th! Up to Merida for Day of the Dead stuff!"  Really, I can think of nowhere I would rather be this early November than mingled among Mayan ruins, but Hipmunk, my favorite little aggregater of airfares, indicates that a one way trip leaving Guangzhou for Merida, Mexico, tomorrow, would cost me fourteen-hundred bucks and involve about 24 hours of travel on two different airlines and three separate flights.  Anyway, I suspect that message, sent by someone whose email signature identifies her as a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize, was intended not for me but for yet another Emily Stone in the chocolate world.  This Emily Stone sources and buys cacao from the Toledo region of Belize for the new (to me, at least) New York City-based Moho bean-to-bar chocolate producer.  Her Chocolate Life profile invites readers to "Come check us out if you're in the neighborhood!"  And I hope that her Peace Corps friends and many of you find her and her chocolate soon.

The second message came from the international man of chocolate mystery Steve DeVries, who was at work planning a week-long chocolate origins tour in Mexico, built around the Tabasco Chocolate Festival, over Thanksgiving.  The tour is open to anyone who's interested--I wish I had the $1750 on top of that $1400 for the last minute flight to sign up!  He sent me the itinerary along with some photos which I'm reproducing here.  Alas, the trip may already be sold out, but do get in touch with Steve right away if you're interested--more interest, I imagine, could lead to more tours.

Schedule for Chocolate Tour of Tabasco and Chiapas in Mexico. Led by Steve DeVries.

This tour is to an area with centuries if not millenia of experience with cacao and chocolate.  This is the area that Hernando Cortez traveled and fought through on his way to meet Montezuma in the early 1500's. I have led a similar but larger tour to Costa Rica the last four springs.  Mexico produces about 100 times more cacao than Costa Rica meaning a lot more available learning opportunities.

  

Fee for the trip, excluding airfare and alcoholic beverages is $1750 single occupancy.   The tour will run with five participants, but can have up to eight. A deposit of $900 is due with sign-up.  Once 5 have signed up, I will confirm the tour and the balance of $850 will be due. 

The van and the driver are being provided by the Secretait of Tourism of the State of Tabasco. If you have any additional question or want to sign-up, you may call me (Steve DeVries) at 970.215.4848 or e-mail me at steve@devrieschocolate.

11/20 Arrive in Villahermosa (VSA) by international flight. Take taxi to the Best Western Madan and check-in for the night

11/21 Monday; Tour of Cacep Chocolate factory, from Roasting to Conching. Also tour of "greenhouse" and  surrounding cacao plantation'

         Tour of large cooperative Fermentation and Drying Facilities

         Travel to Comalcalco and check into the Hotel Copacabana.

11/22 Tuesday; Tour of  factory for Chocolate Brondo in Paraiso. Watch process from Roasting to Conching,  Tour their cacao plantation and others on the area. 

         Return to Comalcalco and Hotel Copacabana

11/23 Wednesday; Tour of Finca Cholula, including their artesanal chocolate production, their small chocolate factory machinery production and surrounding cacao        plantation

         Tour the Zona Arqueologica nearby. The only Maya site with the pyramids built of fired brick, not quarried stone. 

         Return to Comalcalco and tour Hacienda La Luz and Museo Wolter.  Continue stay at  Hotel Copacabana

11/24  Thursday; Tour other cacao plantations and the fermenting and drying cooperative

         Travel to Villahermosa and check in to Best Western Madan. Attend  the Tabasco Chocolate Festival at 1:30 for round table discussion and later talks. They run to 8:00, but anyone can      

         return to the hotel earlier.

 The 2nd Tabasco Chocolate Festival is an international event with professional translators. The site for the event is http://festivaldelchocolate.mx/portal/  but it is only in Spanish.  Here is a machine translation to English by Alta Vista's Babelfish  http://tinyurl.com/Festival-in-English .   Being a machine translation it's a little rough but intelligible. 

11/25  Friday; Morning tours of the Mercado Central and Maya museum/park La Venta. Attend Festival starting at 12:00 to 6:00 

          Stay at Best Western Madan

11/26  Saturday; Travel to Pichucalco and tour the haciendas and fermentary of the Jimenez family. Also visit the Pichucalco Cacao Cooperative

          Stay the the Hotel La Selva

11/27  Sunday; Early start to Palenque, a huge and amazing Maya site.  Google "Palenque, Chiapas, Maya" for more info and photos

. Five or six hours at Palenque and its museum. Return to Villahermosa and Best Western Madan. 

11/28  Monday; Flights home.

Happy Halloween, Happy Day of the Dead, Happy All Souls Day and All Saints Day.  Eat chocolate responsibly.

Reflections on a Silent Month: Alentejo Cake and Other Iberian Recipes

While the mainstream is discovering the multitudinous health benefits of chocolate (cheered on by the new International Society of Chocolate and Cocoa in Medicine), I’m pulling myself away from the headache-causing tannins and the stimulant effects of theobromine. I find myself drawn instead to earnest sweetness of summer figs. During my one month at the Obras residency in the Alentejo region of Portugal, hot and golden-hued in the summer, I bought several kilos of figs a week and ate them without remorse. I also bought many of the other miraculously simple ingredients from the local market in the marble-covered town of Estremoz and came up with a set of wholesome recipes that I contributed to our calm if festive shared dinners at the residency. And when it was my turn to make dessert, I found that chocolate and figs go together very nicely.

Bread Salad
Adapted from an idea my neighbor Anneke Muijlwijk at Obras gave me
Roughly chop a couple of slices of stale Portuguese bread and fry the pieces in olive oil and salt (and pepper, if you haven’t run out) over medium heat until their browned appearance suggests that they’ll be just a bit crunchy. Set them aside for a couple of minutes while you roughly chop half a peeled cucumber, two plum tomatoes, and a handful of big fresh parsley leaves. Press the pits out of a dozen or so green olives and chop them each in two or three pieces. Mix everything together. There’s no need to blot the oil from the croutons since it will dress the salad. Crumble some soft goat cheese or farmers cheese on top.
Serves one, in the middle of the workday.

The Bomb Sandwich
Adapted from a recipe in last month's issue of Bon Apetit, with a name suggested on two different occasions by two different people I met this summer, one Belgian and one Portuguese
Buy one package each of Queijo Flamengo and Jamon Iberico. Have handy a loaf of Portuguese bread, not sliced too thickly. In one layer, place a slice or two of cheese on one piece of bread. Top with a slice or two of ham, also in one layer. Top with another piece of bread. Melt a healthy dollop of butter in a frying pan over medium heat. Smear the outside of both pieces of bread with mayonnaise. Grill the sandwich until the mayo and butter together form a delicious crust and the cheese is thoroughly melted.
Multiply by the number of people eating.

Stone Soup
Adapted from the children's story of the same name, familiar on both sides of the Atlantic. In the fable, the entire population of a village claimed to be without food but when someone began to prepare a pot of soup with only a stone as its base, other ingredients materialized from houses far and wide. In this variation, I put a bit of myself into the soup, adding bits and pieces generously bequeathed to me by fellow artists leaving the residency and returning home for the summer.
Bruise and thin thinly slice five or more big cloves of garlic. Roughly chop half a head of cabbage by slicing it into wedges and then slicing each wedge with the knife perpendicular to the long edge. Open a can of whole plum tomatoes, quarter them, and save the juice. Fry the garlic in a large pot over low to medium heat with a big handful of just-snipped rosemary, thyme, and bay leaves. (At this stage, you could add a hefty portion of the thick rind of a brick-sized piece of prosciutto--or, in Portugal, presunto--that you bought at the market earlier in the summer for two Euro; this step is unnecessary, but it adds a richness of flavor as well as a general feeling of richness in knowing that, on a surface level, the essentially negative amount you paid for this prized meat makes up for the many more Euro you managed to spend just by being impulsive and disorganized, and in knowing that, on a deeper level, living in a place like this where time and good company and the meat of acorn-fed pigs in abundantly available is a long-term antidote to those kinds of irksome rumination over one's actions.) When the garlic begins to brown, add the cabbage and cook just until the garlic seems to going too far. Add the tomatoes and the juice, fill the pot with water, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and let the soup simmer for half an hour or longer. Then bring it back to a boil, add a cup or more of small pasta (little alphabet shapes are good if you are a writer), and remove from heat.
Serves as many as come for dinner.

Alentejo Cake
Adapted from the "Cornmeal and Fig Cake" on Epicurious
Preheat oven to 375F and butter an 8- or 9-inch square cake pan. Take about a dozen figs and halve each one from the stem down to the base and then cut each half into four pieces by slicing in one direction and then slicing again at a right angle (so each fig is divided into eighths). Place the cut-up figs in a bowl with 3/4 cup of pine nuts, and anywhere from 3 to 6 ounces of chocolate pieces (or one to two chocolate bars, roughly chopped). Whisk together the yolks of three big Alentejo eggs with 2/3 cup sugar. Bring three cups of milk to a simmer in a medium to large pot. Whisking, add the hot milk to the egg mixture. Return the milk with the egg and sugar to the pot and whisk over medium to low heat while gradually adding just under a cup of polenta. Continue whisking until the mixture begins to bubble and pull away from the edges of the pan. Remove the pot from the heat and add the figs, pine nuts, and chocolate. Whisk until the chocolate is melted and everything is combined. Pour the polenta batter into the prepared pan and bake for forty-minutes or until a knife come out of the center clean. Cool, remove from pan, serve with great pleasure.

Obras directors Luna, Carolien, and Ludger

Macau to Lisbon: On the Hunt for Egg Tarts

Macau--which I first visited in 1999 just before the outstretched arm of the Portuguese empire contracted and the peninsula and affiliated islands reverted to Chinese control--reminded me, on a more recent visit earlier this month, of Antigua, Guatemala, crossed with Las Vegas. That "Special Administrative Region" of the People's Republic of China was the first stop on my summer holiday. I was accompanied by my friends Nathan and Ana, who asked to be described as "my vigorous and youthful-appearing polyglot buddies," and together we sought out the SAR's best egg tart. Sort of a flan molded into a two-bite-sized pastry shell and then browned under the broiler, the egg tart--along with crusty bread, cobble-stoned streets, and airy courtyards--is one of the most durable Portuguese legacies in Macau. Nathan and Ana's five-year-old son, Marco, has no interest in egg tarts but he does have an eye for light and shadow, and, thanks to him, for the first time in quite a while Chocolate in Context had its own dedicated official photographer on the trip. This August I've followed the luscious pastry I found in Asia back to Portugal, and I'll spend the next month in this calm and quiet European country in the shadow of the twenty-first century. But here at my artists' residency in the Alentejo region, there is a castle on the horizon, a pool down a path to be navigated with a flashlight on a warm evening, and, everywhere, art--real, growling, pulsating art--on the walls of this old, stone-encased farm house. So I will mention a few versions of the sweet snack that spans continents and then return to the cork and olive trees on the horizon.


Ou Mun Cafe
Our first stop was this bakery cafe that beckoned us with its charming tiled exterior but disappointed with its egg tarts whose syrupy filling was the taste and texture of condensed milk rather than the quichey, french-toasty sweet souffle we prefer. We took this to be a baking error made by a kitchen staff too far removed from Macau's Portuguese influence, but I must admit that the first egg tart I tried in the town of Estremoz the other day was very similar.

Margaret's Cafe e Nata
If you're coming from mainland China where such a thing simply doesn't exist no matter what price you name, you'll find nothing so delightful as watching the sandwich ladies smear simple hearty chicken salad made with bacon and avocado on whole wheat bread. The egg tarts are greasy and sweet and the perfect indulgence at the communal wooden tables outside.

Koi Kei
These flaky, light, and reliable mass-produced egg tarts are available at several locations near the bottom of the steps of the ruins of the Cathedral of Saint Paul.

Lord Stow's Bakery and Cafe
A chronicle of Stow printed and displayed in the tiny (but famous and franchised) bakery uses the rhetoric of colonial-era stories but these egg tarts are the twentieth-century invention of an Englishman--and his decision to use cream instead of cornstarch makes them quite luscious indeed.

The best is yet to come?
In Lisbon, the most coveted egg tarts are the Pasteis de Belem made with the Jeronimos Monastery's secret recipe. "They're like the ones in Macau, all caramelized on top," my friend Loring tells me, "but they're somehow more delicious (perhaps because they're made by nuns?)"

Photos by Emily Stone and Marco Stringer Greenleaf

To Hong Kong and Back Again: Big City Chocolate

I like to say that where I live is a two-hour train ride from Hong Kong. The truth is that the trip usually takes two subways (and the accompanying suffocating crowds) in Guangzhou, one train to the wacky frontier town of Shenzhen, a voyage through a seemingly endless network of escalators and walkways leading to an immigration checkpoint more or less in a subway station, and then rides of a couple of different Hong Kong metros before arriving in the central district of the city aptly named Central. What's more, the city of Hong Kong (much like the city of New York) seems to levy some kind of mystical financial capital tax of exactly twice the amount of money I intend to spend on any particular trip. But there are advantages to being on that side of the border, among them that Google is efficient and uncensored. In fact, it was the artificially intelligent Google, not a savvy expat or coffee-stained issue of Time Out Hong Kong, that pointed me toward Epoch Desserts on Star Street. Star Street is a sort of planned community of boutiques and happy-hour bars behind the one of the three Pacific Place office tower behemoths. Epoch serves and epic seven-layer chocolate cake, each layer made with Valrhona chocolate, the old artisan standby and really the best option for baking again now that Scharffen Berger's fine edge of flavor has been sanded off in the Hershey factories. They also serve two varieties of hot chocolate, a regular and a light (the shop attendant described the light variety as "chocolate mixed with milk" and I asked "isn't the regular hot chocolate mixed with milk, too?" and she said yes and looked confused--but you get the idea). If you want to do a live-action google search of chocolate outlets in Hong Kong, you could wander down Star Street from Epoch to find the little art gallery and culture library run by the designer agnes b., which might, in turn, turn you on to the various other agnes b. operations in town, including a couple agnes b. Delices shops that serve elegant little pastries a roster of ginger- and coconut-spiked hot chocolates (that the staff will pour over ice for you during these summer months).

Fated Hutongs and Growing Markets: Chocolate and Other News in Beijing

Everyone and everything seemed to converge at Wudaoying Hutong when I was in Beijing last weekend. I was being a tourist with Pitt MAP leader Dave Bartholomae and his wife Joyce on Sunday afternoon, and my Beijing's Best ap indicated that, from our location at the Lama Temple, we were .3 kilometers from Brand Nu, a boutique that strives to introduce rural craftspeople to urban consumers and to introduce urban designs and profits to the same rural artisans. But the ap's map was malfunctioning, either because Google and my Chinese iPhone carrier weren't cooperating or because the application's creative and technical aims were out of sync (as I talked about with the Pitt MAP students in class the next day, all writing is a struggle to fit particular material into the particular form you've chosen for it). Without specific coordinates, we decided to just wander into the lane, or hutong, across the street from the temple to see what we would find. According to Dave, whose sources include the dog-eared guidebook he carries around with him and Michael Meyer's book The Last Days of Old Beijing, the hutongs are networks of tiny housing units that, by winding in on themselves and away from the outside world, created durable communities, first among extended families, then, after the revolution in 1949, groups of workers, and now, after the economic reforms that began in 1978 and have been reinforced in every five-year plan since then, among artists, entrepreneurs, and middle-class consumers. Familiarly lost, we looked around for friendly souls and then approached them in English. Did they know how to find Wudaoying Hutong?, we asked. Wudaoying Hutong? We were standing on it. We wandered around, comparing this renovated, refitted version of a hutong to the neighboring alleys where a whole family might still share a single room without a bathroom to the cement-dust-covered construction sites in the process of changing from the old style to the new. A few minutes later, Pitt MAP's global health professor Peter Veldkamp, who had been circling Beijing's ring roads on his bicycle, called to find out where we were. Wudaoying Hutong, we told him. Wudaiying Hutong?, he asked. He too was on Wudaoying Hutong.
And after a trip to the iStore-flashing Sanlitun mall, a quiet drink among photos of Mongolian cowboys at the Amilal Whisky Bar, a writing class, and a day of classic Beijing cuisine (street-side noodle vendors and table-side roast duck carvers), I asked some of the Pitt students to join me at a Grave Sweeping Day folk and blues show (not quite the same thing as catching Bob Dylan's China tour, but an exchange of cultural fluids nonetheless). The only thing was we had to find the place. Where was it? Wudaoying Hutong.

Inspired by econ professor Svitlana Maksymenko's sweet tooth, my hosts and I decided to spend the grave-sweeping holiday (a variation on Day of the Dead) seeking out chocolate in China's capital. "The first thing to hit your tongue is the sort of bitterness of this powder," Dave soon declared about the hand-rolled truffles prepared by Laurier Dubeau at La Place Collection, a not-quite-retail store in an office tower (which I discovered on the Chocomap). "But then it's great. It's smooth and creamy. Chocolatey. It's real dark chocolate but without bitterness." La Place's hazelnut truffles, with a core of Belgian Belcolade milk chocolate, taste like finer, fresher Ferrero Rochers; and the dark chocolate variety is unadulterated French Valrhona, the brand I named at dinner when asked what my favorite chocolate was. La Place--just like, as far as I can tell, all of their competitors in Beijing and elsewhere in China--is a chocolatier rather than a chocolate-maker. This means that they don't make chocolate but they use chocolate to make confections. Again, there's nothing wrong with this. Nobody berates the baker for not milling his own flour. But there are a couple of connections I would like to make. Something I've said before but will repeat here is that chocolate is a commodity produced in the developing world and refined and consumed in the developed world. But is China the developing world or the developed--or do we need a new global-power vocabulary? And I will be very curious to see how China, one of the major forces of development in 21st-century Africa (the continent where the vast majority of the world's cacao beans are harvested), will change cacao agriculture, chocolate production, and global views on ethical chocolate trading in the coming years.

Our next stop was one of the several branches of Les Comptoirs de France, recommended by Elyse Ribbons, coordinator of the monthly Chocojing meetings. The menu promises and makes good on several wholesome hot chocolates and the shop we visited dolls up the sidewalk with welcome outdoor seating. But I'd describe Les Comptoirs as a second-rate facsimile of Payard Patisserie in New York: inside the fancy packaging, tart shells are cracked and bonbons are unevenly dribbled with chocolate. Something to point out, though, is that Payard closed down last year and Beijing's Comptoirs are going strong with five locations. Svitlana (a native of the Ukraine who explained that "I'm happy for China--China has done what the Soviet Union wanted but never got a chance to do") attributed the success to two very simple factors: an enormous population and a strong economy. So the market for everything is growing? I asked, taking advantage of our taxicab conversation to make up for the economics class I never took in college. "No," she said. "The market for audio tapes is not growing." A budding Beijing chocolatier named Emay Wang, coincidentally, posted thoughts on the same topic on the Chocolate Life a couple of weeks ago.

To be among other travelers in Beijing in April of 2011 is a poignant experience. We are foreigners to the place, don't know its rhythms or its routines. Yet we're more likely to find extensive, inquisitive reporting of the news at home than locally. The best response, I think, is for us, any of us, from anywhere, to learn as much as we can and come to our own conclusions.

Remembering the Midwest: Minneapolis Chocolate in Spring

I ended the last missive from my shifting geographical location with a cryptic message and a dodgy photograph suggesting that, to be whole people, to be fully integrated members of civil society, we must read essays. What, I know I am provoking you to ask, is an essay? And what does it have to do with chocolate? For one thing, the essay is a form that far too easily collapses into a set of rhetorical questions. What else?

I started graduate school in “creative nonfiction” three years ago teaching “essays” to freshman in composition classes and reading and writing “essays” in creative writing workshops, stridently professing that this thing, this essay, was so inherently different in character from those deadening, restrictive “five paragraph themes” that traumatized me from the first to the last day of high school. Essays, so I said, aspired to intellectual innovation. Essays, truly understood, were art. But what does that really mean? What is an essay? It is true that the essay, the thought experiment, as it was imagined by Montaigne in the sixteenth century, is as different from the scripted student writing that bears its name today as is the meaning of the phrase “coger el coche” in Spain from that in Guatemala. But the plot-driven nonfiction pieces (which resemble short stories except that they pledge a certain journalistic accuracy and are generally more boring) that are passed around as “essays” in a great many graduate workshops don’t fit the classical definition either. Montaigne’s essays weren’t “proofs” in the high-school sense, nor were they “stories” in MFA-program sense. The Montaignian essay shares a lot with the contemporaneous Shakespearean soliloquy: intricately linked motifs and patterns of language help to illuminate and complicate a question or problem, but there is no “narrative arc” to speak of. Over history, several writers have set out to revive Montaigne’s project, with greater or lesser insight into what the project actually was—Patrick Madden I think is among the most current and most responsible of them. Socrates is sometimes invoked as a proto-essayist. Spalding Gray may have been the most significant inheritor of the genre in the 20th century. The Romantic writers were particularly fond of the form and it’s “familiar” tone. Before either of the World Wars, György Lukács put forth a fiercely compelling and confusing definition of the essay as cultural criticism that behaves, formally, like art; in Edward Said’s eloquent summation, written after the World Wars, “Lukács said that by virtue of its form the essay allows, and indeed is, the coincidence of inchoate soul with exigent form.” John D’Agata is the 21st century’s formalist essayist and has offered his own definitions of the word “essay” that are too beautifully succinct to summarize. As a student of the essay, I was first inspired by the intimacy and immediacy of the essay voice, then frustrated with what increasingly revealed themselves to be generic figures of speech and figures of thought that stood in for honesty and spontaneity on the page, then in awe of the way the form inherently acknowledges its own constructedness, the illusion of truth sustained and dismantled at once. Just after my last semester of graduate school, I described the essay at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Minneapolis as “a process of thought recreated for an audience and arranged rhetorically.”

The weekend in 2010 that I was in Minneapolis, Memorial Day weekend, I had to make up my mind about whether I would go back to New York and accept a very decent job teaching college freshman formally experimental essays, albeit following formulaic syllabi, or whether I would voluntarily place myself in peculiar political, linguistic, and financial circumstances to teach creative writing to some of the brightest students in China. Both options offered tremendous opportunities, but neither one was what I had expected and neither one had anything at all in common with the other. This was less a career decision than a neurological experiment tracking the human being’s ability to comprehend contradiction. To up the Woody Allen quotient of the experience, I was also awaiting news about whether I had a brain tumor (I do not: I have Joan Didion-esque migraines and a sinus anomaly that goes unnoticed except on days like today when every factory in Guangzhou is chugging at full speed and I’ve been hit with a hideous Hunanese flu). I had so recently turned in my thesis that I probably showed up with stray editing-pen marks on my face. My conference panel on “Rhetoric and Poetics” was no doubt assembled by the spirits or the ancestors as the farcical celebration of my pending professional commitment to the academy: Where, precisely, did the Virginia Woolf panelist’s accent originate? And who was the man from Alaska in the gray flannel suit?

My host in Minneapolis was my friend Leila’s mom, Kathy, a demographer at the university. Leila and her mother have no particular allegiance to sleep and they can accomplish an astonishing amount in any given 24-hour period. After returning from work and before packing for her trip to New York to visit Leila and her sister Soraya and handing over the keys to me, Kathy completed and printed out a survey of sixteen local academics, two men and fourteen women, who gave anonymous comments about their favorite chocolate in the Twin Cities. They suggested more locations than I could check out on foot and wrote with a more responsible commitment to detail than I probably would have exercised on my own. So, with Memorial Day of 2011 in view, I reproduce a selection of the survey results here with tremendous gratitude to Kathy and her friends:

• BT McElrath is based here and can be purchased in stores like Lunds. Really good, unusual chocolate truffles and candies. "The salty dog" chocolate bar is not to be missed.
• Perhaps BT McElrath: He used to be the pastry chef (I think) of the bakery when it started back in the warehouse district and I recall Peter saying that Bryan was using the equipment to try out some chocolate making. He later left to pursue the chocolate business. When I see his chocolates I am so glad he made it and has become known for it.
Surdyks or Lunds/Byerlys- the highest end chocolate in the Twin cities
• I think the best chocolate truffles in town are made by - gasp! - The Wedge Co-op on Lyndale. they are amazing. They also make what I think is the best chocolate cookie in town - the Black Angus.
• And Rustica Bakery has a fantastic bittersweet chocolate cookie.
• I've got to put in a "second" for whoever mentioned the Bittersweet chocolate cookie from Rustica. They are amazing. My husband and I always buy a bunch when we have people coming into town, and then we say, "You HAVE TO try this cookie! Isn't it the best cookie you've ever had?"
• Big old house and chocolate chocolate chocolate... Rogue Chocolatier. New - just chocolate that they make themselves.
• Rogue: I think it is available at Kopplin's Coffee in St. Paul's Highland Park, at Kitchen Window in Uptown Minneapolis, and in Surdyk's Cheese Shop in northeast Minneapolis.
• If you're talking chocolate cake, I love the one (Can't remember the name of it and they have a few varieties) at Cafe Latte in St. Paul. There's also "Cupcake" and another good cupcake place near Trotter's cafe in St. Paul (can't remember the name of that one).
• If the writer really wants a local slant, besides Regina's (someone else identified it too)--she should buy a few Nut Goodies. Pearson's is so local you can't get it in Chicago--I don't know even if they distribute in Wisconsin. I grew up with them as the "luxury"--they were ten cents when Hershey's was a nickel. They stopped making Nut Goodies for a few years when I was in my 20s, then started up again. Nut Goodie has become a travel talisman for me, ever since I threw one into my bag for my first trip to Africa and found myself eating it at midnight in a hotel in Harare when they seemed to have lost my laundry. I now carry one on every trip, two for Europe, three for other continents. My personal travel de-stresser; I never eat them at home. Too sweet and very ordinary, but very comforting.
• There are also some fabulous hand made ice cream places that have great chocolate options, especially Izzy's and the Pumphouse Creamery. Both use organic, local ingredients and environmentally friendly production practices.
• I would also recommend checking out the Sweet Bakeshop. Local, organic butter, eggs, etc. Highly acclaimed.
• The chocolate ganache cupcakes at the Franklin Street Bakery are a favorite of ours.

In May of 2010, I began to compose this blog post while walking in Minneapolis along that vein of American culture, the Mississippi River. Whatever precise adjectives, rhythms of explanation, and thematic resonances I arrived at were too fragile to survive nearly a year of rattling around in my head (displaced by another Midwestern journey, at least). But the combined curiosity about and hunger for the bloom of spring, the taste of unknown local sweets, and the possibilities of the future returned to me today as I followed the new Pearl River promenade to the Guangzhou Bridge across to Ersha Island, thinking in words that explained my state of mind, even to me.

I put things off but rarely forget them. In my essayists’ mind, I make connections between disparate occurrences, drawing past and present, or present and future, together suddenly, finishing an old abandoned project only to distract me from a new impending deadline (I know, Mr. Feng! You need me to record last semester’s grades on those inscrutable forms! Coming right up, Mr. Feng! Many apologies, Mr. Feng!). Guangzhou has the river but it doesn’t yet have post-industrial blue skies or farmer’s markets in refashioned factories. I’d have to return to Minneapolis to find those, and to have Nepalese dumplings in front of art exhibits, to sample shortbread cookies made with American heirloom ingredients and Scottish family recipes, to talk to raw-chocolate quacks and breakfast-cereal artisans. Today, I posted my pictures from last spring in Minneapolis, and from my more recent travels here in Asia, on the Chocolate in Context Facebook page. It occurred to me to do this today because I was thinking about my own writing in preparation for a talk that I’m going to give to students in the Pitt Map study-abroad program in Beijing next week. I was thinking too about how long it’s been since I’ve updated this blog. I wrote this post a bit out of obligation to the Pitt students who are expecting to meet a writer, a fellow blogger, but also as a way of figuring something out—that the blog, today, more than so many other things published under that flag, is the essay. Blogs are where we are intimate and eccentric, where we ramble on, make loose connections, and enjoy the boundlessness of the form.