A New Low

I have reached a new low. Yesterday, I ate a piece of a Ghirardelli’s 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate Baking Bar. I found it in the baking aisle at my local grocery store. It was with the unsweetened and semi-sweetened chocolate chips, bags of pecans, and vials of sprinkles. I didn’t buy it to use for baking. I bought it to eat. You see, it turns out that I’m completely and utterly addicted to dark Belgian chocolate and it’s really hard to find here!

Well, perhaps addiction is a strong word – let’s use LOVE. I love chocolate. I know, I know ... lots of people love chocolate! Here in St. Louis, I see lots of T-shirts and mugs in stores dedicated to this not-so-secret passion. When I lived in Belgium, however, I didn’t ever see chocoholic merchandise. There were no T-shirts, or mugs, or pens, or scarves declaring the wearer to be dysfunctional without chocolate! Instead, there were retro-style boxes and tins that reminisced of simpler times and of the long history of chocolate making in that region.

Chocolate was brought to Europe as a drink in the 16th century by the Spanish, who imported it from South America. In the 17th century, it was an expensive commodity only enjoyed at “court” and by the very wealthy, but later, higher production and new inventions for roasting and grinding cacao beans and for solidifying chocolate into bars made it more accessible to lower class Europeans.

My favourite chocolate purveyor in Brussels was Neuhaus, although there are several really good names there. Apparently, Jean Neuhaus and his pharmacist brother-in-law founded their pharmaceutical and confections company in the middle of the 19th century right down by the Grand Place in the Galeries de la Reine. About 50 years later, one of the Neuhaus kids put a new spin on things, by discovering a way to fill chocolates. Yum! If you’ve never had one of these filled chocolates, called “praline”, you haven’t lived!

Chocolate is a serious business in Europe and there are regulations stipulating the proportion of cocoa solids relative to cocoa butter and sugar for my favourite type, which is the dark chocolate. At lunch, my friends and I never argued about which one of us took the dark, milk, or truffle mignonette of chocolate that always came with our after-lunch coffees. There was just a quiet shuffle as we each reached for the one we liked.

It’s a nice custom, that little sliver of chocolate at the end of a meal. It tells your body that you’re finished eating and it can begin to digest. In fact, isn’t there some property to chocolate that aids in digestion? Wait, no, it lowers cholesterol, or blood pressure or something. I can’t remember. I just know it makes me happy!

I miss the shelves and shelves of Belgian chocolate at the grocery stores! There was always a huge selection. I did find a store in St. Louis that sells Belgian chocolate. The experience is similar to a high-end Belgium store in that you can choose from several types of hand-made chocolates that are displayed importantly beneath glass, like jewels. I invited the kids to choose one chocolate each. Our carefully selected gems were weighed and packaged in a tiny gold box. In Belgium, those three chocolates would have cost a handful of Euros, but here those three little beauties cost twenty dollars.

I told them to eat slowly.