Chocolate by Sarah Moss (ebook voice reader .TXT) 📕

experiment with: flowers (rose, jasmine, violet), spices (vanilla, cardamom, chilli), herbs (rosemary, lemon balm, thyme), fruit (citrus zest, crushed raspberries, mango pulp). You could also add coffee, almost any kind of spirits, aromatic teas or whatever else seems likely to work.

275 ml whipping cream

450 g chocolate

Put your chosen flavouring into the cream and heat gently. Turn off the stove and leave it to infuse until you have achieved the desired strength (probably around 20–30 minutes for more subtle flavours and rather less for chilli, coffee or pepper). Melt the chocolate,either in a bowl over simmering water or gently and carefully on the stove, and then pour the flavoured cream through a sieve into the melted chocolate. Stir thoroughly to combine, and place in the fridge for around fifteen minutes. Using a teaspoon, make small balls of the truffle mixture, which could be dredged with a good cocoa powder, icing sugar and/or spice. Return to the fridge to set, and eat within 48 hours.

Patrick’s Guanaja Chocolate and Armagnac Mousse

This recipe comes from Patrick Williams, who runs the award-winning Patrick’s Kitchen in The Goods Shed, a daily farmers’ market and restaurant in Canterbury, England. Patrick makes and sells about four batches of this each week, and it is deservedly popular. A respectful use for really good chocolate!

300 g chocolate, 70% Guanaja or similar

300 g unsalted butter, finely chopped

6 medium eggs, separated

6 egg whites

70 g caster sugar

40 ml (a good shot) of Armagnac (optional)

Cautiously melt the chocolate and butter pieces over slow simmering water in a metal or glass bowl. When it is melted, take off the heat.

Put the egg yolks, 60 g sugar, splash of water in another bowl. Place this bowl over a pan of fast-boiling water and whisk the contents together until the mixture is pale and thickened. Remove from the heat, and whisk in the Armagnac. (The aim is to get the chocolate mixture and egg yolk mixture to a similar temperature for Step 3.)

Softly whisk the egg yolk mixture into the melted chocolate, mixing gently but thoroughly, including the edges of the bowl.

In a clean, dry bowl, whisk the egg whites (by hand or machine) with a pinch of salt. When they form soft peaks, addthe remaining sugar and continue whisking. (The sugar helps the egg white to stiffen slightly.)

Lightly whisk a third of the egg whites in to the chocolate mixture to lighten it. Fold in the remaining egg whites carefully and thoroughly, taking care to lift the melted chocolate at the bottom of the bowl. (This maintains consistency across the entire batch.)

Spoon carefully into about 8 small ramekins, or one large bowl, and chill, preferably overnight.

Eat within a couple of days.

References

1   Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London, 1996), p. 22.

2   Marcy Norton, ‘Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics’, American Historical Review (June 2006), pp. 660–91.

3   Robert Latham, ed., Diary of Samuel Pepys (Berkeley, CA, 2000), vol. III, p. 182.

4   Marquis de Sade, Lettres à sa femme, ed. Marc Buffat (Brussels, 1997), p. 327 (my translation).

5   Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford, 1995), p. 243 .

Select Bibliography

Books

Brown, Peter B., In Praise of Hot Liquors: The Study of Chocolate, Coffee and Tea-Drinking 1600–1850 (York, 1995)

Clarence-Smith, William Gervase, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914 (London, 2000)

Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London, 1996)

Cox, Cat, Chocolate Unwrapped: The Politics of Pleasure (London, 2003)

Doutre-Roussel, Chloé, The Chocolate Connoisseur: For Everyone with a Passion for Chocolate (London, 2005)

Foster, Nelson, and Linda S. Cordell, eds, Chillies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World (Tucson, AZ, 1996)

Harwich, Nikita, Histoire du Chocolat (Paris, 1992)

Knapp, A. W., Cocoa and Chocolate: Their Historyfrom Plantation to Consumer (London, 1920)

Lopez, Ruth, Chocolate: The Nature of Indulgence (New York, 2002)

Off, Carol, Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet (Toronto, 2007)

Richardson, Paul, Indulgence: One Man’s Selfless Search for the Best Chocolate in the World (London, 2003)

Satre, Lowell J., Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business (Athens, OH, 2005)

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants (New York, 1993)

Szogyi, Alex, ed., Chocolate, Food of the Gods (Westport, CT, 1997)

Terrio, Susan J., Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate (Berkeley, CA, 2000)

Young, Allen M., The Chocolate Tree: A Natural History of Cacao (Washington, DC, 1994)

Articles and Journals

Special issue on chocolate, Food and Foodways: Explorations in the Culture and History of Human Nourishment, XV (2007)

Few, Martha, ‘Chocolate, Sex and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala’, Ethnohistory, LII/4 (Fall 2005), pp. 673–87

Laudan, Rachel, and Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ‘Chiles, Chocolate and Race in New Spain: Glancing Backward to New Spain or Looking Forward to Mexico?’, Eighteenth-Century Life, XXIII (May 1999), pp. 59–70

Norton, Marcy, ‘Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics’, American Historical Review (June 2006), pp. 660–91

Prufer, Keith M., and W. Jeffrey Hurst, ‘Chocolate in the Underworld Space of Death: Cacao Seeds from an Early Classic Mortuary Cave’, Ethnohistory, LIV/2 (Spring 2007), pp. 273–301

Websites and Associations

Chocolate History

The Chocolate Research Portal https://cocoaknow.ucdavis.edu/ChocolateResearch

Cocoa Reworks: Memories of Rowntree www.cocoareworks.co.uk

Borthwick Institute, University of York http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/bihr/guideleaflets/womens/women_doc6_rowntree.htm

Chocolate Campaigns

Stop Chocolate Slavery http://vision.ucsd.edu/~kbranson/stopchocolateslavery/goodchocolateproducts.html

International Labour Rights Forum’s Cocoa Campaign www.laborrights.org/stop-child-labor/cocoa-campaign

Be Treatwise campaign www.betreatwise.org.uk

Chocolate Firms

Amedei

www.amedei.com/jspamedei/index.jsp

Bloomsberry

www.bloomsberry.com

Bonnat

www.bonnat-chocolatier.com

Côte d’Or

www.cotedor.com

Seattle ‘Chick chocolate’

www.chickchocolates.com

Tony’s Chocolonely

www.chocolonely.com

Valrhona

www.valrhona.com

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Max and Tobias for patience in chocolate shops, and to Anthony for pretending to believe that all the chocolate was there for professional reasons.

Sarah Moss

Thanks to Linda McGavigan for kindly opening up her own private stock of chocolate lore from Trinidad; Margaret and Norman MacDonald for opening up their vast stores of knowledge; Frank Schipper and Judith Schueler for sharing bits of Dutch chocolate lore, Emma Robertson for pointing out (and creating) the cocoa reworks project; Sara Slinn at the Borthwick Institute in York for