Can Anyone Write a Better Chocolate Book than Sophie Coe?

I met with one of the members of my thesis committee yesterday, and she told me that "you've done enough reading. It's clear. You don't have to do any more. Please stop." I'd just turned in forty pages chronicling my adventures and misadventures with chocolate in Guatemala--forty pages which referenced Richard Rodriguez, Joan Didion, Daniel Chacón, and, of course, Sophie and Michael Coe. In my experience, any magazine article, quirky novel, or scholarly monograph about chocolate inevitably draws on the culinary-historical-archaeological synthesis in the Coes' The True History of Chocolate. That's because the culinary-historian-and-archaeologist couple, who drew the title of their book from Bernal Díaz del Castillo's The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, were meticulous about going back to and making sense of the primary texts about the chocolate-related intersection of European and American cultures: Díaz, Thomas Gage, Fray Bernardino de Sahugún. Marcy Norton, a historian at George Washington University, sets out to build on or redirect that true chocolate history in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. The pairing is less familiar to our modern minds than coffee and cigarettes, but Norton's concern is that the two new-world products cacao and tobacco migrated to and transformed the old world simultaneously. "The question that drives this book," she explains, is, "What, exactly, did it mean for Europeans--bound as they were to an ideology that insisted on their religious and cultural supremacy--to become consumers of goods that they knew were so enmeshed in the religious practices of the pagan 'savages' whom they had conquered?"

Norton's attempt to intertwine the cultural and psychotropic stories of cacao and tobacco is compelling, but the book often seems to be an amalgam of already studied and published facts. She doesn't have a terrible amount of evidence to suggest that the link between the her two colonial commodities was anything more than theoretical, and her comparisons are often strained and repetitive. In the absence of a more concrete relationship, the book might have benefited from more creative juxtapositions. For example, Norton mentions that "[w]hen Indians on the island of Hispaniola (probably) offered Columbus a bouquet of dried tobacco leaves, it did not stimulate great excitement," but she misses the opportunity to draw a connection to the explorer's similarly blasé response to cacao. In The True History of Chocolate, the Coes write that "the first European encounter with cacao took place when Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage, came across a great Maya trading canoe with cacao beans amongst its cargo," and they later provide an account of the contents of the canoe (including the cacao beans or "almonds") written by Ferdinand Columbus, the explorer's son:

For their provisions they had such roots and grains as are eaten in Hispaniola, and a sort of wine made out of maize which resembled English beer; and many of those almonds which in New Spain are used for money. They seemed to hold these almonds at a great price; for when they were brought on board ship together with their goods, I observed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.

The definitive history, it would seem, is the Coes' history. Even Norton suggests, in a footnote to her introduction, that "[f]or a synthesis on pre-Columbian chocolate, see Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London: Thames and Hudson 1996), 11-104." She goes on to mention that "[s]ince the publication of the True History, there has been a boom in pre-Columbian chocolate studies, well represented by the contributions in Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao."

I came home from my meeting yesterday and read a good portion of the Chocolate in Mesoamerica anthology, edited by Cameron L. McNeil (who references the Coes in her first paragraph), which includes specialized articles about the Sonconusco region of Guatemala and about the uses of the alien-spacecraft-like cacao-relative pataxte. But then I did stop reading--I had to, in order to start writing.

Novel Guatemalan Chocolate: Who Is Carlos Eichenberger?

Well, for one thing, he's the guy who gave me a ride from Guatemala City to my old hometown of Antigua the day after I spoke about this blog at the first (annual?) symposium on cacao hosted by the organization FundaSistemas in December of 2008. The focus of the conference was how to increase the tonnage of cacao exported from Guatemala by a factor of at least several hundred and thereby speed up economic and political development in the country. That's a process I would be fascinated to observe, but I'm reluctant to suggest that I have either a position to take regarding how to do it or expertise in advising anyone else to take up such a position. I am always happy, though, to talk about the nuanced implications of producing and consuming the materials in the developing and developed world that fuel the (increasingly international) small-scale artisanal chocolate industry.

I've been doing a lot of research in Guatemala over the past year on exactly that subject, though I haven't written much about it. In the midst of conducting a Top Secret Project about the Revival of Chocolate in the Ancient Maya Birthplace of Chocolate, I found that there were several other people doing the same thing. But, as I've mentioned recently, being the first person to the story isn't all that important to me. The literary world's general reverence of Proust, for example, (whom I still have not actually read) has little to do with the notion that he was the first person to remember things past. So, I figured, if other people want to talk about chocolate in Guatemala, let them have at it.

That said, I might as well speak up from time to time. So here goes: Carlos Eichenberger, of Danta Chocolate, is producing a bean-to-bar chocolate in the country of origin, in this case, Guatemala. When I met him at the symposium last year, he was buying beans through a broker. I introduced him to the owner of a farm called las Acacias in the Guatemala/Mexico border area often referred to (among chocolate fanatics) as "Soconusco" (Shawn Askinosie produces a Soconusco bar). I haven't had a chance to try one of Danta's Acacias bars yet, but I've had Carlos's chocolate and I've had las Acacias beans. Both are some of the finest specimens of their kind. The combination is a novelty worth writing about: Danta mentioned on the Chocolate Life, Danta mentioned in El Periodico.

Chocolate Month: February Musings

I started the year by looking simultaneously backward and forward. Such a back-and-forth glance is an expression not only of my general inability to catch up but of the inherent tension at work here between journalistic and imaginative instincts. Put another way, novelty is overrated while renewal (while nearly impossible) is inspired. So, for the second month in a row, I will attempt to reinvigorate resources from years past.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Tim McCollum at Madecasse, asking about their "tree-to-bean-to-bar" chocolate made in Madagascar. My response is that I savored each carefully packaged and labeled sample that Tim sent but I undermined the scientific tasting process by indulging myself in them before bed, letting the 63-70% products mingle among the books on my nightstand. I will say that I agree with all of the characterizations of the chocolate that Tim included in his letter to me: the not-yet-released 75% is more subtly roasted (and thus packs a more nuanced flavor) than the currently-available 75%, and the 67% is the most impressive of the lot. If asked to give my own analysis, I would say that the 67% has a flavor that unexpectedly suggests raspberries. However, I'm reluctant to take that kind of tastes-like cataloging any further today. My reasons lie in the conclusion to the ekphrastic essay by poet Mark Doty Still Life with Oysters and Lemon:

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.

Metaphor expands, embodies creativity. Clinical explanation reduces, boils down insight to keywords. To call my taste experience "raspberry" is the opposite of rendering the inchoate, ineffable sensory experience of tasting in metaphor. I would rather say it sent me moving through a viscous somnambulance. You can invent the raspberries on your own.

I've received a number of other tidings since the beginning of 2009, among them, word of stalwart Valrhona's naming of San Francisco chocolatier Michael Recchiuti as their American chocolate "ambassador," timed to the release of what I understand are some brand new blends and bars. (Recchiuti, along with a lovely Guatemalan cacao farmer named Neto Porras and several other chocolate professionals in several countries, no doubt has come to the conclusion that I'm either deeply disturbed or deeply ungrateful since I've been utterly out of touch since our last meetings--please accept my apology, guys--I was just looking for the right words.) Amano has a new chocolate (in new packaging) too: it's called Jembrana. The sultry New Orleans chocolatiers Sucre sent me an early Valentine: a box packed with half a dozen ganache-filled hearts. And Ten Speed press sent up a flair about their new publication, called Give the Bitch Back Her Chocolate. It's a series of word-and-vintage-image pairings, most more sleazy than seductive, and I hope you won't make such a very direct connection between this writer and that title, but the collection give me a wonderful image to ruminate on.

As I take another look back, I recall that Scharffen Berger (whose Ibex logo has served as my muse cast in chocolate) announced its sale to Hershey within days of me starting this blog over three years ago. This post is timed to the news that Hershey will close the beloved Berkeley plant. I mourn the loss absolutely, but prefer to focus on smaller pleasures. Like metaphors that may or may not include raspberries.

New Year, Old Bread, Claudio Corallo Chocolate, and Coconut Oil

A while ago--I can't remember exactly when, but I can tell you it was another year--a man who had recently left his family's scrap metal business to pursue a career as a scrap metal sculptor asked me what I wanted in life. "I want to always have new experiences," I said. "And I want to have a constant sense of who I am and what I'm doing."

"Are you listening to yourself?" this guy asked me. "How can you always be doing something new and be constant?"

By harvesting contraction, I suppose. And by recognizing the human willingness to become trapped in such contradiction. I'm leery of announcing that I want anything in particular for or from the year 2009 (and yet this very writing suggests that I am somehow compelled to announce that very thing), but what I want hasn't changed much since that conversation with the sculptor: change, consistency. And, in fact, I have the same plans for Chocolate in Context, as the blog moves from 2008 into 2009. I'll still be writing about chocolate as it relates to cooking, travel, society, pleasure, pain, and other things. I'll make announcements, changes, regular updates, irregular updates. I'll rest comfortably on what I've already done, and then do something uncomfortably different.

As you, reader, look forward to everything new in 2009, you'll no doubt have to rely on a couple of things that are old as well. As you begin to think through that contradiction, I recommend that you whip up a batch of Lunatic French Toast, developed by Robinson Crusoe-esque chocolate maker Claudio Corallo (he lives on the volcanic African islands of Sao Tome and Principe). The recipe calls for coconut oil (which gives the breakfast dish a wildness that's almost symbolic) and "old-ish bread," which you may have left over from 2008. Claudio Corallo's US distributor, James Clark (whom I interviewed a few months ago) generously shared the recipe:

Lunatic French Toast
1 Egg
1/2 cup milk
Slices of old-ish bread
Coconut oil or butter
Your favorite Claudio Corallo Chocolate

Directions:
Whisk the egg and milk together. Heat a heavy skillet and melt some coconut oil or butter in the bottom. Soak your bread in the "custard" and fry gently on both sides over low to medium heat. When each slice is done, remove it from the pan and place on top a piece of chocolate the size of a pat of butter

After a minute or so, the chocolate should be melted enough to spread over the top of your French Toast. You won't need any syrup. If you are using the 100% cacao, you might enjoy sprinkling a tiny bit of granulated sugar on top. Now think about it: your bittersweet chocolate is less insulin-y than a gob of syrup would have been, you have protein from the egg...nutritionally you're set, and if you used coconut oil, you're jammin'. But obviously nobody eats French Toast because it's good for you...

Revise and Conquer: Chocolate Heroes and Heroines

George Saunders, MacArthur Genius Award winner and a liberal-minded quick-witted model citizen of the 21st century, has written that "the best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker." In the optimistic (despite this semester's "narrating war and protest" theme) and frenetic freshman composition courses that I teach at the University of Pittsburgh, I obsessively quote Saunders, along with the heady and graceful poet/memoirist Patricia Hampl ("it still comes as a shock to realize that I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know"), and I present revision as the divine route to, if not salvation, at least understanding. At the beginning of the semester, I tell my students that "revision is much more than copy-editing--it is an informed return to a piece of writing, an opportunity not only to refine but to reconsider your writing." Toward the end of the semester (that is, right now), as projects get longer and questions get more complex, I emphasize that "while writers often approach revision as a way of looking back, revising can also be about looking forward."

I don't always follow my own advice. In the free-wheeling rant I posted on this blog a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'm not writing very much right now. What I do write, I don't tend to revise. This semester, I tend to give my work a quick scan, followed by a long sigh, and then I send it off to where it needs to go (this website, a professor's mailbox, an editor's inbox), hoping I won't have to look at it again any time too soon. But what would have happened if I had reread and revised my post about "Barthes and the Chocolate Man"? I might have found that my philosophical bafflement over Roland Barthes was actually the key to a provocatively original analysis (anyone similarly hoping to turn frustration into epiphany may want to consult the heartening textbook for introductory classes much like the one I'm teaching The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, by Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue). I also might have concluded--perhaps more importantly, in this context--that my comment that "while food industry insiders find chocolate to be the greatest thing going, I'm finding the conversation to be a bit banal" was incomplete, worthy of more elaboration. I could have said, instead, that the oversaturated market makes the search for transcendent experiences in chocolate more challenging.

But there are, of course, transcendent experiences to be had. That is, there are still heroes and heroines in the chocolate world. Last weekend, I made my annual trip to the Annual New York Chocolate Show, where I discovered a chocolate-outfitted Wonder Woman, a new(ish) California chocolatier named Christopher Michael (and Food & Wine magazine reports on yet another one: Eclipse Chocolat), and several old friends and allies, including Jeff Shepherd of Lillie Belle Farms, who told me that my purchase of his new "Red Velvet Almonds" would go toward his daughter's college education.

And I've gotten--in addition to bogus chocolate tablets imprinted with PR slogans--some terrific chocolate samples in the mail in the past couple months. Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate sent me his latest 67% and 70% mircobatch Madagascar bars--the stuff is currently more expensive than Valrhona and it's not (yet) as good as Valrhona, but Alan is dedicated enough to get there. The utterly unpretentious staff at Michel Cluizel's US outpost sent me the company's new 85% and 99% "ganaches" (or ganache-filled bon bons), packed tightly into a handy little box that's no bigger than a pocket reference book--the ganache itself was a bit too dry and grainy for my tongue, but the little box is an absolutely delightful marketing feat.



Looking back is useful, helpful, necessary. So is looking forward. Sometimes, you can take your work, rearrange it, make it work better. And sometimes, you have to break the whole structure apart. One of the most vindicating moments of the last month was when a bunch of guys (mostly roboticists and nuclear power plant engineers) whom I invited over to play poker took it upon themselves to forcibly demolish the Axe chocolate tablet.

Barthes and the Chocolate Man

My decision to start this blog was arbitrary. I liked chocolate, I talked about it in ways (both high and low) that other people didn't seem to, and I had a lot of free time. I imagined that, perhaps more than taste-testing the substance itself, I would write about obscure things peripherally related to chocolate. If the blog had taken that trajectory, I might have sat down sometime over the last month and written about the ludicrous commercial I saw at the cinema, for the new chocolate-scented Axe body spray. I might have written about how--perfectly timed with my viewing of the ad in which women flock to and then consume parts of a man who appears to be made of chocolate--I received an email from a publicist for Axe, telling me that "more than 70 percent of women around the world ranked chocolate as more irresistible than shopping, jewelry or even sex. Based on this insight, AXE created new AXE Dark Temptation, both a bodyspray and a shower gel for guys that is as irresistible as chocolate." (That publicist sent me a box of samples several weeks ago, and I only this moment realized that the box contained not only the shower gel, which I have been using on myself, and the body spray, which I have not, but also an enormous block of chocolate on which the above PR slogan about women, chocolate, and sex is printed.)

However (as regular readers of this blog must have noticed) I've spent the past month writing nothing at all.

Perhaps the reasons for my silence come not from chocolate at all but from an existential crisis about the act of writing itself. But, read another way, that crisis has everything to do with chocolate. At exactly the time that I started this chocolate blogging endeavor a few years ago, the (artisan/artisanal/high-end/origin/high-cacao-content/call-it-what-you-will) chocolate industry and the business of writing about it mushroomed from a sideline fascination into a full-fledged cultural phenomenon. So instead of writing about chocolate-laced advertising campaigns, I started to write about individual pieces of candy, their flavors (or lack thereof), and the importance (or lack thereof) of their cacao percentages. And people read this stuff and wrote back, and I, in turn, kept up the dialogue by writing yet more about the subject. (Even during the month when I wrote nothing here on Chocolate in Context, Imbibe magazine deemed me an expert on the subject--though you'd have to find a hard copy October issue to read it.) Lately, though, while food industry insiders find chocolate to be the greatest thing going, I'm finding the conversation to be a bit banal.

In my mind, the (at least pre-financial-meltdown) astronomical growth of the specialty chocolate market has resulted an extraordinary increase in the production of mediocre chocolate, or products that employ artisan techniques yet have neither the taste nor the generally laudable creativity of the first wave of contemporary American chocolate makers. On my last trip to San Francisco, I asked the astute Seneca Klassen what he thought about all of this. He answered that

There's a fundamental problem with the whole concept of artisan chocolate making at this time, and that is that one of the components that I generally associate with artisanal processes is that they're intergenerational, and that there are skills that are passed down from person to person. And that's been erased over the past hundred years of chocolate's history because of the industrialization of the product. So there aren't people to go ask how to do this stuff. So what does artisan mean, then? So we're at the point where anybody entering this pursuit has to basically start from scratch and cobble together what knowledge they can, however they can, and hopefully build relationships over time that improve that body of knowledge. But it's a pretty weird set up because basically we're all fishing in the dark, trying to achieve really high quality, amazing things, but the results are radically different. And that's only within the small community of people who really give a shit. There's a broader community of people who just want to be able to more effectively market and label their products.

The Axe Chocolate Man is just such a person. I am meant to infer (though this is certainly not what I or anyone watching this ad would actually feel) that this (artificial) image of a man made out of (artificial) chocolate is sexy, or somehow sexier than sex. I'm not talking about chocolate anymore. I'm talking about some kind of body spray that's not made of chocolate and doesn't even smell like chocolate, but rather smells like the very distinctly non-artisan artificial aroma that, as a result of those hundred years of industrialization in the food industry that Seneca referred to, Americans now associate with chocolate. Well, isn't this what I set out to do with this blog anyway? To make sense, as a chocolate fan, of representations of chocolate? Perhaps. But what's the point? "[T]his is the point:" writes Roland Barthes, whom I take entirely out of context, "we are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification. Mythical speech is made of material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth (whether pictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, that one can reason about them while discounting their substance." Here, I might have been inclined to lapse into an anecdote about my-only-partially successful attempt to fill up my empty writing hours with reading hours and about how I found Barthes's Mythologies to be some combination of useful and baffling. Such an anecdote would have allowed me to wrap my self-deprecating characterization in a bit of classy prose in which I dismiss my inability to apply my reading of Barthes to the Axe ad in anything but the most coincidental of ways. I might have done that, except that, in his essay "Blind and Dumb Criticism" in the same book, Barthes asks,

...But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic? To understand, to enlighten, that is your profession, isn't it? You can of course judge philosophy according to common sense; the trouble is that while 'common sense' and 'feeling' understand nothing about philosophy, philosophy, on the other hand, understands them perfectly. You don't explain philosophers, but they explain you.

Why be a critic, indeed? I don't know, man, but I think it's a question worth my time to figure out. And that might take another month (or more) of not writing about anything. For the moment, I'm resolved to sit here a bit bored and a bit baffled, reading the enormous chocolate tome presented to me by the Axe Chocolate Man. ("Eighty-two perfect agreed that chocolate is a temptation that is hard to resist," it tells me.)

Robert Steinberg

Robert Steinberg, the San Francisco physician whose own diagnosis of lymphocytic leukemia propelled him into the chocolate business (and eventually into founding Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker with John Scharffenberger in the 1990s), died this week.

In the 2006 cookbook The Essence of Chocolate, Steinberg wrote that

Since we began Scharffen Berger, I've received many letters from people who are coping with an illness of some sort. Whenever I can, I write back. Many of the letters praise my openness about my leukemia as "courageous." But I don't see myself as courageous. Cancer is such a charged topic in our society, it's easy for an illness to become sort of a dynamic event, but not very easy to shrug off the kind of stigma we assign people with cancer. To talk openly about my illness is simply to talk about an integral part of my being. It's kind of hard for me to imagine trying to direct a conversation away from the topic without being closed and mysterious in a way that is foreign to my sense of self. Being open about my leukemia also lets me acknowledge what I know for sure from my years of practicing medicine: every one of us has challenges to face. The deeply felt and beautifully written letters that have been sent to me connect me to people in an unusually personal way. For those who have asked me how to approach life with an illness, I can say this: there are no useful generalizations, but to the extent that your illness and life circumstances allow, try to be yourself and understand that in accepting who you are, you are likely to become more accepting of others. It may not be readily apparent, but that sort of compassion is a reward in itself.

In a tribute on the Scharffen Berger website today, John Scharffenberger wrote that

The chocolate world has lost a great visionary, and I lost a good friend.

I met Robert Steinberg as a friend and neighbor in Mendocino County. It was later, however, as his patient, that I came to recognize his focused and thoughtful intellect. These powers of analysis and investigation set him apart from any doctor that I had encountered and became the basis of my absolute trust in his judgment and taste.

Among many others, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and Serious Eats have run obituaries.