DIVINE CHOCOLATE

 

Sonho de Valsa,  Brazilian chocolate and cashew nut bonbon.

 

 

Mexican molinillo, in forefront, is used to stir chocolate.

 

The name the Europeans gave to the cocoa bean,  Theobroma cacao, food of the gods, is a splendid spin on the Nahuatl word used throughout the Aztec empire where Cortez found it, xocolatl.   Imagine the frisson that went through  the Spanish court when the Conquistadors talked about this seed that was so valuable it served as currency in  New World. Imagine the PR person for  Amalgamated Spanish Plunderers saying to Queen Isabella,

 

“It’s  as precious as gold, Your Catholic Majesty. Why over there five beans will buy a rabbit, ten will buy a night with a prostitute–begging your pardon, Your Catholic Majesty, they are heathens, but a taste of the Inquisition’s strappado will fix that–and a hundred buys a slave.”

Imagine the queen’s reaction when she sipped the cold bitter drink made with ground up cocoa beans, cornmeal, chili,  and cinnamon. I do not know the royal Spanish equivalent of “yuck, this is vile” but I suspect the queen uttered words to that effect. It took twenty years for the Spanish plunderers of Mexico to learn that the Aztecs fermented cocoa beans, to lessen their bitterness and that they often added  honey and vanilla to their xocolatl to  made it more palatable. This discovery coincided with the arrival in Spain of sugar from the Caribbean. The rest is history.

What intrigues me in  the history of chocolate is the relative obscurity to which it relegated the Portuguese  Jews who played an important role in bringing it to Europe. It is only recently that the chocolate manufacturers of Bayonne, France  decided to  highlight the contribution of these Sephardim. Now the Bayonnais talk openly about these Jews who,  in flight from the Iberian Inquisition, turned  Bayonne into France’s foremost center for chocolate manufacture.   Sadly, a century the good Bayonnais had acquired the skills needed to take over the chocolate industry. Encouraged by the   anti-Semitic propaganda of members of  the chocolatiers guild, they threw out the Jews. For the latter,  it was  “deja vu all over again.” .

This historical footnote  has a special meaning to me.  Sephardim who fled to France early to avoid the Portuguese Inquisition,  are among my maternal ancestors.They  settled in northeast Brazil some five centuries ago. When the Dutch invaded that part of the world in  1630–a century after my Sephardic ancestors’ arrival in the New World–Jews were able to reestablish contact openly with branches of their European families.They were active participants in the sugar trade. Some of them traded in  cocoa beans as well. It is possible that this imagined relative was  among those to bring to  France and Holland  Maya and Aztec stories about the aphrodisiac qualities of  the cocoa bean.  But that is purely  speculative. However, it is a matter of record  the belief in chocolate as a sort of proto-Viagra took roots in the European imagination. Casanova is said to have fortified himself with it prior to amatory bouts.   Louis XV, the well-loved, relied on  a mixture of chocolate bars dissolved in boiling water and thickened with egg yolk to enhance his lovemaking with Mesdames Pompadour and du Barry.  He was only one of many westerners to believe a legend that, so far, scientific research has failed to legitimize.

Though chocolate trading  is not part of the documented history of  my family, I cherish the thought that somewhere in the family tree there lurks a cocoa bean  trader. Never mind that my childhood was devoid of chocolate treats. That strikes me as very peculiar.  Brazil happens to be the  sixth largest producer of cocoa beans in the world. Surely there was plenty to go around when I was little. Did its association with the bad habits of old roues keep it out of my menu? I doubt it.  Maybe it was a simply a question of transportation. Roads linking my little town in Ceara to large urban centers were not the best. Consequently, most of the town residents  led lives of utter self-sufficiency.  Having no cocoa trees meant having no chocolate. Or did it? My parents happened to be economically comfortable. They traveled and shopped in larger  places  than my hometown. Why did they not  bring home chocolate? I have no idea. All I know is that I only became a chocolate eater the year I turned thirteen.   That year, I left home  to go to school in the cool, verdant Cariri hills, miles away. That was my first solo voyage.   At thirteen, I was thought to be capable of  handling new privileges, new responsibilities.I took with me a secret Yom Kippur prayer my maternal ancestors had been passing on  to their eldest child for five hundred years, school uniforms, and the burden of parental expectations. For the first time in my life, I had enough pocket to spend in candy shops. Was all this pure  coincidence? Jewish girls that age become bat Mitzvah, but that is an innovation in terms of Jewish history. Besides, five centuries after Spain expelled its Jews,   my family no longer connected with normative, Judaism. Ours  is the memory of Jews in hiding. It records through a glass darkly.

Fact–at thirteen, I left home in the dubious company of my family’s driver, a murderer my father had sprung from  jail–my father often hired clients from his law practice for jobs he alone thought they were qualified for. Presumably, he thought  a murderer was a safe person to drive a sheltered teenager school. But my father and his endearing quirks are material for another post. Chocolate is the allegedly the topic du jour. Chocolate as in Sonho de Valsa, the cashew stuffed bonbons I savored  along with Catholic novels of morals  such as Henry Sienkiewicz’s QUO VADIS, Florence Barclay’s THE ROSARY, and appallingly sugary romances by M. Delly, such as  MAGALI, Only Saint-Exupery and Jacques Prevert stood between me and complete idiocy

Besides halwa–especie, in northeast Brazilian Portuguese–made by maternal grandmother,  I do not recall eating sweets other than  chocolate while I was away from home. Delightful as my memories of weekends with the relatives who occasionally liberated me from conventual dreariness,  I have no recollection of the food we shared. I only remember clearly the chocolate ice cream we would have  at a little shop facing the  cathedral where my teachers compelled me to attend mass every day. Chocolate then was the last sweet note of freedom from a regimented routine. Ever since no treat  matches the nostalgic  flavor of semi-sweet cocoa with a top note of vanilla. In my mind, it blends, exquisitely,  with the sounds, scent, and  sights of a Sunday  kermess that brought the largest town square to life–the carousel that blared the Moulin Rouge song, the rustle of freshly starched clothes, the perfume of  jasmine  and red of tree blossoms, the glow of paper lanterns,  the smell of buttered popcorn.

Years later, in the United States, I acquired a more sophisticated taste in chocolate. Thanks a friend whose relatives had a long lasting relationship with  Viennese makers of bespoke chocolate, I graduated to artisanal treats. Later, in my food journalism days,   I tasted Bolivian, Belgian, British,  French, Italian Mexican, Swiss, and Venezuelan chocolate. I ate chocolate made in Vermont by a former White House chef, sampled  handmade chocolate truffles in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Hershey, Pennsylvania, and  Martinsburg, West Virginia. Could I choose a particular brand over another? Yes. In the United States, I would choose Peter’s chocolate, occasionally available at King Arthur Flour, in Vermont. In Europe,  I would choose the Austrian chocolate made for the Hungarian aristocracy, but the friend who used to share it died a few years ago. I never bothered to find out the name of her Austrian chocolate makers. All in all,  I am not one of these folks who swear by Caillebaut, Cote d’Or, or Varlhona.  I do not crave truffles made in the light of the new moon is some remote Oaxacan kitchen. Only rarely do I miss the hot chocolate I had in Spain, a concoction so thick one could stand a spoon in it–Spaniards thicken their drinking chocolate with cornstarch. I can live with American hot cocoa.  I am OK with British and Swiss  imports I can in most  discount stores in the United States. As a rare treat, I indulge in   Brazilian Sonho de Valsa bonbons. Thing is, to me,  all chocolate is divine.I am grateful to the Sephardim for helping make it available to mere mortals.

Note: My immediate family has no ancestral recipes for chocolate. I hope someday to duplicate the chocolate halwa I had at the Rue des Rosiers,  in Paris, years ago. It was a heavenly  mix of Old and New World flavors.

PIGEONS IN THE PARK

Arroz do Maranhao.

 

Squab from D’Artagnan.

 

Arroz do Maranhao.

Long before Tom Lehrer sang about poisoning pigeons in the park, Ernest Hemingway stealthily decimated the pigeon population of the Luxemburg Gardens, in Paris. The time was the mid-Twenties when poverty was romantic provided that you were an American writer married to a woman with a trust fund. That was when the budding novelist frequented  the Brasserie Lipp, La  Closerie des Lilas, Cafe’ Flore, Les Deux Magots during the day and sipped  liqueur with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the evening.Somewhere in between, he wrote  and tended his first child whom he would occasionally take  to the Medici Fountain at the Luxemburg for an airing. There when no one was looking, he would strangle foolhardy pigeons and stash their carcasses in the baby’s pram for future consumption. It is possible–and anything is possible with American literary myths–that the stowaway pigeons inspired him to call his Paris memoirs A MOVEABLE FEAST.

My own pigeon-based repasts  had another setting. They happened in a huge double house  my parents shared with close relatives in the outskirts of a small town Ceara’, Brazil. I must have been six or seven at the time and this house remains in my memory as a place of magical beauty. It was set next to woods where poisonous snakes and free range chickens lived in an entente cordiale and where I hid under a fragrant green dome of  velame, Croton campestris,  to read my father’s copy of LES MISERABLES, of which I understood next to nothing.

All paradises have serpents. Mine had, besides real reptiles,  an intractable, somewhat mad second cousin who terrified me with his angry outbursts. He was, however, a passionate hunter who often brought home fat bags of quail and  rolinha caldo de feijao, Columbina talparcoti, which he roasted on an open fire.Woe to me if I glanced at him while he drowned his roasted birds in malagueta pepper sauce.

“‘Are you spying on me,” he’d roar.That was a grave accusation.

That was a grave accusation. Espiar, to spy had a double meaning in my part of Brazil. It could be understood as “ogling someone’s food” which hinted at being hungry, therefore poor, something Ibero-Brazilians hated to make known.Only beggars had the right to flaunt their poverty.Everyone else ought to  have the decorum of the  bankrupt Spanish grandee so aptly described in  the saying, por cima tanta farofa, por baixo mulambo so’ —so much fancy stuff on top and nothing but  rags underneath. But for people of means be as undignified as to display their hunger in public was shameful and demeaning. Such behavior in a child my age meant that was mal educada, badly educated, badly brought up,  ill-mannered.) An ill-mannered child reflected badly on her parents and to tarnish the parental image was serious stuff. Life was complicated back then. As for the other meaning of espiar, it was to spy. Again, serious stuff  for people of the Crypto-Jewishpersuasion. One’s choice of food was an indicator of one’s religious practices and throughout centuries,  many a Crypto-Jew perished in the flames of the Iberian Inquisition for choosing olive oil instead pork fat or for refusing to mix milk products and meat at the same meal.

Whether my second cousin’s paranoid fear of  spies had to do with hidden Judaism or not, I  do not know.  All I know is that his anger often went as suddenly as it came. In his calm moments, he was generous enough to share his food–roasted quail, boiled umari, Poraqueiba cericea nut, wild honey in the comb,  and once in a great while, squab from his dovecote.

Maybe one has to be a bit mad to kill four-week-old pigeons. They look so utterly helpless, so unfinished, so vulnerable in their huge-beaked, bright-eyed, sparsely feathered vulnerability.  But sympathy for members of  the animal kingdom was rare when I was little.   As long as they fit into Jewish dietary laws, birds  were for eating. In the Middle east, pigeons  had been on the menu since Biblical times. I imagine that while they lived in Spain where, allegedly, they were taken by the Romans after the fall of the Second Temple, my ancestors ate b’stilla, the Hispano-Moorish pigeon, almond, cinnamon, and sugar pie the recipe for which exiles from Iberia took to with them to Morocco following the 1492 Expulsion.

My folks did not make B’stilla. After  half a millennium in Brazil, their recipe for warka, the translucent, phyllo-like dough that envelops the filling of b’stilla,  must have disappeared along with their  Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish. Dona Julia, my parents’ cook did not have the skill needed to replicate the food of Hispano-Jewish banquets. Even so, what she did with my cousin’s squab, was brilliant.  She cooked them in an ample quantity of broth to which she added rice–Maranhao red rice, if I can trust my memory of that long-ago meal–to make a casserole.

I do not recall watching the transmutation of  squab and rice into a dish similar to the sopa seca of Spanish-speaking countries, but I have a vivid memory of how it  looked and smelled when it came to the table–fist-sized, golden birds lay on a bed of red  rice spangled with golden coins of fat. A pool of rich broth redolent of annato seeds, garlic, shallots, black pepper,  cilantro and chives encircled the rice. It was the food of dreams, infused with the evanescing  memory of Judean banquets, Roman feasts,  and celebrations in the  Moorish-Iberia of my maternal ancestors.

Should I decide to emulate Hemingway, there is a little park near my house where I can push an empty pram. There  should be no health concerns. According to James LeRay Morgan, author of CULINARY CREATION, ” squab meat is regarded as safer than some other poultry products as it harbors fewer pathogens (than poultry) and may be served between medium and well-done.” Trouble is, the local gendarmerie police patrols the park more assiduously than the guards of the Luxemburg Gardens did in Hemingway’s time. It would be wiser to order squab from suppliers in California. D’Artagnan, for example,   offers the choice of squab with  head and feet still attached and the decapitated variety. I would go for the  headless and footless bird. As a person twenty-first-century sensitivities, I no longer care to be reminded the appearance of  live animals prior to their  arrival at my plate. I do not have access to a source of freshly harvested arroz do Maranhao, but I have a stash of red Himalayan rice that should be a good substitute.

 

Arroz do Maranhao on the left.

Please click on the for the Recipe

 

GLOSSARY

Anatto–Annatto (/əˈnætoʊ/ or /əˈnɑːtoʊ/) is an orange-red condiment and food coloring derived from the seeds of the achiote tree (Bixa orellana). It is often used to impart a yellow or orange color to foods, but sometimes also for its flavor and aroma. Its scent is described as “slightly peppery with a hint of nutmeg” and flavor as “slightly nutty, sweet and peppery.”Wikipedia

Crypto-Jew–Forcibly baptised Sephardic Jews and their descendants who continued to keep Judaic traditions secretly.
“Malagueta pepper Capsicum frutescens is a species of chili pepper that is sometimes considered to be part of the species Capsicum annuum.^[1] Pepper cultivars of Capsicum frutescens can be annual or short-lived perennial plants.”Wikipedia

 

THE SEA, THE SEA

 

Look up codfish on the web and you face a deluge of information of astounding similarity. You find out that the Basque were the earliest Europeans to fish for the Atlantic cod,  Gadus morhua in late 15th. century Newfoundland. They were soon followed by the Portuguese, whose Catholic faith  that forbade meat-eating on Fridays, Lent and other occasions. Dried and salted codfish thus became a staple in  Portuguese menus. So much so that it consumers named it fiel amigo, faithful friend. According to folklore, the Portuguese cuisine boasts a codfish recipe for every day of the year. Best known among these are Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá, a cod casserole that includes potatoes, olives, parsley , onions, and fresh lemon slices; Bolinhos de Bacalhau, fritters made with dried cod, mashed potatoes, garlic,  onions, and parsley; Sopa de Bacalhau com Tomates e Beldroegas, a soup that includes cod, tomatoes, and purslane.

Thanks to my Brazilian origins, my cooking repertoire includes not only  Bolinhos de Bacalhau, but one of my favorite dishes, Bacalhau com Leite de Coco, Cod and Coconut Milk,  an Afro-tropical take on the traditional European Portuguese recipe. There are many variations on this theme. Some call for carrots and  potatoes while others include green, red, and yellow peppers. Traditionally, Bacalhau com Leite de Coco is made with azeite de dendê, oil from the fruit of an African  palm tree, Elaeis guineensis.  but I have read recipes that call for olive oil  or soy oil. Having moved from Northeastern Brazil  to the Eastern United States decades ago,  I rarely found dried cod in local markets, let alone azeite de dendê  . Enter internet commerce, which  makes it possible  for me  to locate and buy the most recherché food products. That is how I lay my hands on two pounds of deboned salt cod packaged in  Brazil.

Portugal is no longer the world’s prime purveyor of salt cod. That honor goes to Norway,  which exports it wherever there is a demand, such as in Goa,  Jamaica, and the Madeira Islands. Thus, the codfish I bought recently  was a well-travelled fish. Compared to the cod Portugal exported to Brazil years ago, this deboned, plastic wrapped product  was a tame beast, a pallid version of the Iberian product. Nevertheless, I soaked in hot overnight, as one did the extremely salty bacalhau of my childhood. The following day I drained it  and added it, plus  a cup of diced tomatoes,  to an onion and two fat cloves of garlic sauteed in olive oil.  Once the resulting sauce thickened, I added  a twist of freshly ground black pepper, a sprinkle of oregano, and  a tin of coconut milk. I let the mix simmer for twenty minutes prior to throwing in half a cup of whole wheat penne. Finally, I served it over a cup of fresh spinach and garnished it with  a handful of chopped fresh coriander.It was a good soup though mild and somewhat characterless dish compared to the food served at my mother’s table. I suspect neither my seafaring Iberian ancestors nor my coastal Brazil relatives would not have thought much of it. But I live far from the sea. There are no palms in my adopted hometown. My olive oil comes from Tunisia and coconut milk comes from Sri Lanka. I do what I have been doing since I left my home country–I adapt, adapt then adapt some more. That is what immigrants do. That is, no doubt what my Iberian  ancestors did when they reached the New World.I may live in a global village, but  longing for  the salty taste of the sea is part of my ancestral memory. Soon I will try to duplicate my mother’s Bolinhos de Bacalhau. But that is another post.