Ann's Blog
Spain and the Caribbean:
October 21, 2010
A chocolate connection
With a couple hours to spare late one afternoon in Barcelona, we nipped into the Museu de la Xocolata (Catalán for “The Chocolate Museum”), run by the city’s Confectionery Guild. That our admission tickets were chocolate bars seemed very promising. Much of the place, however, is given over to extolling the chocolatier’s art – with display cases of elaborate chocolate sculptures: the Pietá (about half life-size); Don Quixote tilting at windmills; a complete bullfight scene. Sorry, guild members, but admiring a kitschy chocolate work of art (will a bust of Elvis be next?) isn’t nearly as much fun as popping a piece in your mouth and letting it melt on your tongue.
But I did discover a couple nifty factoids among the exhibits devoted to the history of chocolate in Spain, including one with a sailing connection. The name given in 16th-century Mexico to the most favorable breezes for carrying ships laden with cocoa beans across the Atlantic was viento chocolatero – “chocolate wind.” Yum. I can almost smell it. The first shipment of beans arrived in Spain in 1520, by the way, a year after Cortés first arrived in Mexico.
When we were in Córdoba a week later, I discovered another chocolatey connection with the Caribbean. In a shop called SpicyChoc, I found an obscenely expensive Belgian dark-chocolate bar with tonka beans, a spice that West Indians grate into cake batters to impart a warm vanilla-almond-peach flavor.
I couldn’t wait to rip into the package. There was no doubt that this chocolate was infused with tonka beans – over-infused, to my palate. (The wrapper told me that the content was 3% tonka bean, after all.) The delicious nutty vanilla notes were definitely there, but the gritty ground beans interfered with the mouth feel of first-rate chocolate. I’ll stick to using my stash of tonka beans in cake batters: Subtler. And a lot cheaper.
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