here are few social scripts as clear as the one for Valentine’s Day: If you love someone, and if it is February 14, you buy them chocolates. And while you can buy them any chocolates, there is nothing that says Valentine’s Day as loudly and clearly as an array of chocolate bonbons nestled in a festive heart-shaped box. The heart-shaped box eliminates the possibility of ambiguity: These are not just regular chocolates; these are chocolates of romantic love.
It is not a creative gift online. That is the beauty of it. It is simply what is done. There is a heart-shaped box of chocolates for every price point. You can buy a heart-shaped box of Hershey’s chocolates at Target for $4.99, or one from Burdick for $52, or an embroidered heart-shaped box of chocolates from Godiva, which costs $99.95.
Regardless of cost, the basic premise of the heart-shaped chocolate box is always more or less the same. It is a box. Inside, there are chocolates. The box is heart-shaped. Usually, the heart-shaped box is made of cardboard and is red, but sometimes it is pink or purple, or all three, with gold embellishments.
Sometimes, it is tied with an actual ribbon, or — cheaper — a picture of a ribbon. The contents vary, too, within a very narrow range. In its most classic form, the heart-shaped box contains an assortment of individual chocolates, presumably because it is prettier if they are different from one another, and also variety helps keep love exciting.
It is a logical pairing. Hearts are associated with romantic love. Chocolate is associated with romantic love. Chocolates need boxes, and boxes have to be shaped like something. Really, it was only a matter of time.
Yet the assumptions that make it logical — that hearts symbolize love and chocolate is sexy — are not obvious at all. When did hearts become icons of feelings, and why are they shaped like that? Also, chocolate: why? “Because it was thought to be an aphrodisiac!” you say — I also said — but then, think about this: So are oysters. So is mint. So is tarragon. And still here we are, in the CVS candy aisle, staring at rows of chocolate hearts.
A brief history of sensual chocolate
For the first several millennia of chocolate consumption — in her book Bitter Chocolate, journalist Carol Off dates cocoa back at least 3,000 years — it was served not as a solid, but as a drink. The Maya peoples in Central America were known to prepare a beverage made from beans that had been soaked, aerated, ground, and mixed with various spices. Occasionally, Off writes, it was sweetened with honey; it was always mixed with ground corn and then frothed. It was a sacred drink, associated with religious rituals. It was also a drink of the elite. “It would be more like port,” Rebecca Earle, a history professor at the University of Warwick, tells me. “Something that men drank while conducting diplomacy.”
It is not clear if the Maya or another Central American group, the Aztecs, drank chocolate to prepare for other, more intimate encounters. “The Spanish thought that Aztecs thought chocolate had aphrodisiac qualities, and maybe they did,” Earle says. “There are these coy comments in some of the Spanish accounts from the 1520s, ‘Montezuma used to drink a cup of hot chocolate before visiting his wives.’” Whether it was true or not, the reputation stuck.
The Spanish conquistadors also sweetened chocolate, adding not honey but Caribbean sugar. And it was the conquistadors, Earle says, who began associating chocolate with women. Now sweetened, it acquired a reputation as something colonial women drank, while they lay around, lasciviously, and engaged in romantic intrigues, the New World equivalent of rosé.
In Spanish dispatches from colonial Latin America, there were all kinds of complaints “about women drinking chocolate all the time,” Earle says. “Women poisoning faithless lovers with cups of hot chocolate. Women drinking chocolate in church while mass was being celebrated. Women poisoning priests who tried to stop them from drinking hot chocolate during mass with a cup of hot chocolate. It becomes kind of linked to feminine treachery and intrigue.”
Chocolate — dark and murky and, like most food then, prepared by women — acquired a reputation as just a little bit dangerous. Who knows what’s in there? There are lots of court cases from the period involving men going to the Inquisition and accusing women of casting spells via chocolate. “They’d say, ‘I know she did it because she gave me this cup of chocolate, and after that … whatever it was that I’m complaining about started to happen,” Earle says.
It was the Spanish who brought the now feminized, now sweet, and maybe sexy chocolate back to Europe, where it was both fashionable and expensive. Also, still mostly liquid.
Solid chocolate candy — the stuff that comes in the heart-shaped boxes — is a product of technology. By the early 1800s, chocolate was losing ground in Europe. The drink was “greasy” and “gritty,” Off writes; Europeans were moving on to tea and coffee, more refined stuff. The problem was cocoa butter: People didn’t like the taste of it, but removing it was laborious and time-consuming and not all that successful, anyway. Until, that is, a Dutch chemist figured out how to use a hydraulic press to efficiently squeeze the grease from roasted cocoa beans, separating the cocoa from the fat, which remained a useless byproduct.
And then a British chocolatier found a use for it: It turns out that by adding small amounts of melted, clarified cocoa butter back to the cocoa solids, and then adding sugar and other flavors, you get a moldable, “melt-in-your-mouth treat that could be mass-produced and sold at an affordable price.” This new chocolate was even more accessible; you could, depending on your economic status, buy one bonbon, or several.
It is almost certainly not a coincidence that the new possibility of solid chocolate candy coincides more or less exactly with the invention of contemporary Valentine’s Day. And the link between chocolate and seduction presented a market opportunity. “Etiquette books and chocolate advertisers alike encouraged the view that an exchange of chocolates between a man and a woman was tantamount to a declaration of love,” Earle explains in the Independent.
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