By G.D. Maxwell
All of us need solace at some point or another. We need a safe harbour, a retreat, the warmth of loving arms – literal or metaphoric – succour in times of trouble and stress, reassurance when doubt drills into the core of who we thought we were and exposes us for the frauds we really think we are.
Relief comes in many forms. Drink, drugs, religion, anonymous encounters in strange beds, the comfort of familiar friends and even more familiar foods, routine, ritual, travel, escape, the enveloping warmth of a hot bath or the jolting reality of a cold shower, movies, books, music and art, just about anything you can think of brings comfort to some.
The essence of comfort is generally rooted in familiarity. If it wasn’t, we’d all be comfortable with the idea of walking into a party full of strangers or delivering a speech before a large audience.
Comfort is, as well, most often grounded in simplicity. Macaroni and cheese is comfort food. Wasabi-encrusted filet of endangered species draped in raspberry infused, so-virgin-it’s-actually-unborn olive oil, and piled high on a plate of unidentifiable vegetable matter is not only uncomfortable but quite likely just leaves us with an overwhelming desire to grab a framing hammer and head for the kitchen to explain the concept of food to the chef.
And for many of us, chocolate is the ultimate comfort. Chocolate rights all wrongs, displaces discomfort, parts the clouds and stops the rain. Chocolate warms a chilly room, mends broken hearts, soothes raging muscles and empties a crowded space. Chocolate makes a bad movie better and a good movie great. Chocolate takes us back to the person we were the first time we tasted it even though we’re not aware time’s shifted.
And now, we’re in the process of messin’ up a good thing.
"Chocolate is the next coffee! Chocolate is the new olive oil! Chocolate now is where cheese was 10 years ago!" enthuse various beautiful people in a story in last week’s New York Times.
Unlike the vapid announcement running like wildfire through the fashion world a few months ago that gray is the new black – "Oh thank God. I was beginning to feel so drab!" as one trendy Goth was heard to exclaim – this one hits too close to home for, well, comfort.
It would appear my fellow boomers, the same creatures of wretched excess who visited the plagues of SUVs, dot.coms, nouvelle cuisine, vacuous musicals, cigars, $200 a bottle tequila, and 5,000 square foot homes on us, are about to do to chocolate what we’ve done to everything else we’ve turned our ravenous attention to. If I’m not mistaken, I think the technical term is FUBAR.
I can’t remember the first bit of chocolate that slipped into my mouth but I can vividly remember the last. Now that my Perfect Partner is slingin’ the true gift of the New World over at Roger’s a couple of hours a week, it was a delectable concoction of milk chocolate, almonds and crunch. I’m not sure what exactly crunch consists of – used as a noun, not a verb – but I assume it was everything dancing around in my mouth that was neither chocolate nor almond, both of which I can correctly identify 99 times out of 100, either together, as God meant them to be, or alone. Whatever it is, it’s delicious.
The thought of some insufferable, pot-bellied, thinning-haired but ponytailed snob who’s never had an original thought that couldn’t be traced back to a Condé Nast magazine looking down his nose at such a confection and dismissing it as pedestrian gives me new insight into what just might lead an otherwise peace-lovin’ guy to declare cultural jihad.
But dismiss it they will. I mean, how can something with no cachet, no pedigree, no tres chic celebrity chocolate chef’s name attached to it pass muster in the world of haute pretension?
How pretentious, I hear you ask?
Let me lift just a couple of examples from the Times story. "At Dean & DeLuca, chocolates made by Michael Recchiuti come with instructions: ‘We suggest a pairing with still spring water.’ Dean & DeLuca also stocks the world's first chocolate identified by a ‘vintage’ year: the Valrhona Chuao, made with cocoa beans grown in a single region of Venezuela."
Where, no doubt, the subsistence farmers who grow them do not make enough in a year to purchase a box of vintage chocolates or a bottle of still spring water to wash them down with. But the demand for something so expensive it bears a name four out of five consumers will mispronounce will surely lead to rainforest destruction on a more massive scale than inflicted to produce the Big Macs those same discriminating consumers have forsaken as being health risks. Ya wanna side of irony with that?
Or how about this taste treat? "At Chocolate Bar, a Greenwich Village storefront that calls itself a candy store for grown-ups, New Yorkers have the luxury of choosing among bars of perfectly plain chocolate containing 60 percent, 72 percent or 85 percent cocoa mass, the pure, unsweetened content of the cocoa bean. Fanatics are devoted to Michel Cluizel’s super-bitter Noir Infini, which is 99 percent pure cocoa mass, even though 85 percent is considered the upper limit of palatability for most mortals."
I’ve got to admit, at least that last one appeals to my sense of humour. Give the suckers something so pure it’s unpalatable and then charge them so much for it the clerk ought to be wearing a mask and carrying a gun. And they’ll line up like rats in a lab experiment waiting for the push of the bar that releases the food pellet.
Army "C" rations used to include an inedible can of mystery entrée, the details of which could only be guessed at. There was a can of mystery sweet roll with a 10 year shelf life. There was toilet paper, Chiclets, a little pack of three cigarettes… and a chocolate bar. The chocolate bar was nothing special; if memory serves, Hershey had the contract for decades, maybe still today. But the chocolate bar was the prize inside the dross. It wasn’t there for quick energy and it wasn’t there to keep the GIs from eating the toilet paper and ministering to their personal hygiene with the sweet roll. It was there to provide comfort and escape, if only momentarily, from the unthinkable reality they often found themselves in.
Maybe the best hope for world peace, as it turns out, isn’t the defeat of George Bush next year. Maybe peace will come when soldiers in the American army go on strike when they open their field rations and discover that little Hershey bar hasn’t been replaced by one of Fritz Knipschildt’s concoctions like lavender-caramel or chili-tangerine or almond-jasmine-praline.
Betcha think I’m making that part up. If only.
