A Love Affair To Remember

By Patricia Winton

Italian chocolate, made only with cocoa butter, explodes in a burst of flavor when you eat it. (Read why here.) But a taste that’s even more intrinsic to the Boot is caffè, those little cups of sugared espresso downed by most Italian people throughout the day. What could be more Italian that a confection combining the two? And Ferrero, the company that brings you Nutella, Rocher, and Tic Tacs, did just that in 1968 with Pocket Coffee.

This ingenious little treat is a shell of good chocolate encasing a shot of sweet espresso. The sugar in the coffee crystallizes and attaches to the chocolate, giving it a crunch. Pocket Coffee can be a bit dangerous to eat because the espresso is quite liquid. To my way of thinking, a piece is too big for one bite, so I nibble off the end, drink out the coffee, then munch the chocolate. The amalgamation of texture—the melting chocolate, the sugar crystals, the syrupy coffee—floods my mouth and puts a smile on my face.

Because the confection is damaged by heat, the company only sells it during cool months. In April, suppliers remove all unsold Pocket Coffee from shops and bars and do not provide it again until November. I’ve tried stockpiling it. In my non-air conditioned apartment, the chocolate collapses. I tried refrigerating it. The coffee solidifies. I’ve resigned myself to treating my favorite treat as a seasonal product like strawberries or artichokes.

Ferrero has made a nod to people like me who miss Pocket Coffee in the summer with a new product called “Pocket Espresso.” Composed a of chocolate-espresso liquid, this confection is packaged in tiny tub resembling a Pocket Coffee wrapper but slightly larger. It comes with a minute straw for sipping. For the past two years, suppliers have replaced Pocket Coffee with Pocket Espresso when they sweep out the more fragile product. To my mind, it’s a poor substitute

I first came to Italy the year after Pocket Coffee appeared, and a love affair began. After I returned to the US, I pined for my lost love, but I have never seen it for sale in an American shop. It is available online now, but I offer a word of warning. One site provides this legal disclaimer: Actual product packaging and materials may contain more and different information than what is shown on our website. My skeptical self suspects that Pocket Espresso may be substituted during hot months when Pocket Coffee is out of season. A look at the Pocket Espresso page notes this: Sign up to be notified when this item becomes available. That means it’s coming in April.

Pocket Coffee will soon disappear here in Rome. I’m going out for another box for one last fling. I won’t be stockpiling it this year, but come November, I’ll renew the romance.

Sweet Treats and Chocolate Hills

By Beth Green

Quick. Name me an Asian chocolatier.

Can you do it?

Chocolate is a ubiquitous sweet worldwide, as much in the Eastern Hemisphere as in the Western. But here it’s an imported sin, a luxurious nibble that has some aura of otherness about it.

Except, of course, in the Philippines. The Spanish, those plant-introducing conquistadores, brought cocoa to the Philippines in the 1600s, and cocoa farming has been a commercial concern here since the 1950s. Although the impact of Philippine cocoa is negligible on the world market—most cocoa production seems to be in Cote d’Ivoire, according to Wikipedia—the domestic market here is chock-full of great chocolate. I don’t mean candy bars either—foodstuffs made with actual cacao, like cakes and shakes, are just plain awesome in the Philippines.

However, if you Google “chocolate” and “Philippines” together, one of the first entries you’ll find isn’t for a confectioner’s. Or a baker’s. Or even for a farmer. It’s for the Chocolate Hills, a curious land formation that is unique to Bohol, an island province.

The Chocolate Hills are conical mounds, some 100 feet high or more, that rise up steeply, giving way to rounded tops, and are covered by grasses. Seeing one of these hills might remind you of a backyard anthill a thousand times high. Except, you’re multiplying that thousand-times-magnified anthill by one thousand hills, creating a vast, strange landscape that’s somewhere between bumpy and beautiful. There are, according to a blog on the Bohol provincial government’s website, about 1,200 of these hills, a number that’s hard to comprehend when you climb up one and look out to the horizon filled with the same round hills.

Legend has it that giants made this crazy, carbuncular landscape. Either fighting giants or lovesick giants, too preoccupied by their over-sized emotions to have a care about the breasts of earth they pushed up. Science gives us an interesting answer too: tectonic forces pushed the limestone seabed above water, and then rain and wind wore them down to Hershey’s Kisses of karst.

In the wet season, they'd be better named the "Mint Hills."

But how did they get the name “Chocolate Hills?” Because you grow chocolate there? Because they’re shaped like chocolate drops? Because an old place name happens to sound like the English word chocolate? Because when you go to the visitor’s center they give you free chocolate? These were all my guesses when we traveled to see them on my first visit to the Philippines, in 2011. But I was being too literal, and my guesses, even that tempting last one, were all wrong.

The Chocolate Hills are named after the hue of the grass that grows on the limestone slopes; when it dries up once a year, it turns the thousand smooth hills a chocolatey color—a treat, but only for the eyes.  

Bean There, Done That

By Alli Sinclair

As a writer, I take research very seriously. I’ve invested years sampling this particular invention so I can present today’s post with good authority—chocolate.

Three thousand years ago, the people of Central and South America, and in particular, Mexico, cultivated theobroma cacao, the original cacao bean, and used it in religious ceremonies and for medicinal purposes. They found the bean could combat fatigue, not unlike the effects of coffee. For intestinal and stomach problems, a chocolate drink was mixed with the bark of the silk cotton tree. If fever and fainting were the problem, then patients consumed eight to ten cacao beans mixed with dried maize kernels.

Archaeologists in Puerto Escondido, Honduras, discovered the cacao had been cultivated as far back as 1100 to 1400 B.C. when they found a white pulp from the cacao bean in a vessel and, later, discovered the ancient Hondurans used cacao pulp as a sugar fermented to create a type of alcoholic drink. 

The Aztecs didn’t use chocolate in cooking, even though many people think they did. According to food historians, the Aztecs prepared their chocolate drink by grinding roasted cacao beans and mixing them with water and adding chili, maize, or honey. Sometimes they added flowers, and consumed the drink cool, not hot. Coriander, sage, and vanilla (extracted from the pods of orchids) were also favorite additional flavorings.

The Mayans of the Yucután drank their chocolate hot, a precursor to today’s popular drink. In 1556 A.D., a conquistador published only as the Anonymous Conqueror documented how Mayans prepared the drink. They mixed the powder with water and transferred the liquid from one basin to another so the foam rose to the top of the vessel. They stirred the drink with gold, silver, or wooden spoons and kept their mouths open wide to let as much foam as possible pass between their lips. The conquistador witnessed people drinking this concoction in the morning then walking for miles for the remainder of the day, not stopping for more food. (Probably trying to burn off those calories, methinks.)

Conquistador Francisco Hernandez sampled a variety of chocolate drinks on his travels—green cacao pods, honeyed chocolate, flowered chocolate, and a bright red chocolate made from the huitztexcolli flower. And according to accounts by the Spanish officers who dined with Montezuma in 1520 at Tenochtitlan, the king enjoyed drinking chocolate from cups made of pure gold.

After the Spanish conquistadors made their mark in the Americas, they imported chocolate to Europe. Only the wealthy could afford it, and to keep up with demand, the Spanish fleets enslaved the Mesoamericans (people of Aztec and Mayan descent) to get them to produce more cacao. Eventually, the Spanish grew their own beans and used African slaves as labor.

By 1657, a Frenchman opened London’s first chocolate house. And in 1689, Dr. Hans Sloane discovered a drink made from chocolate in Jamaica. The bitter taste didn’t appeal to him, though, so he mixed it with milk. He sold the powdered chocolate in tins to the Cadbury brothers in 1897 and, in my humble opinion, the world changed for the better. The Dutch van Houten family created what is known as “dutched chocolate”—a method that squeezes out cocoa butter, enabling the chocolate to be set hard in molds. Yes, history’s very first chocolate bars! But it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that these little bars of joy saw mass production and became available to the general populace.

In 1899, Jean Tobler opened up a chocolate factor in Berne, Switzerland, changing the course of chocolate once again. He invented the modern Toblerone by combining almonds and a unique blend of cocoa. My mouth thanks you, Mr. Tobler, but my waistline doesn’t!

A Mr. Rudolfe Lindt thought adding cocoa butter back into the cocoa mass of crushed and ground beans might be a good idea. He did this, lengthened the kneading process, and a velvety smooth and very shiny type of chocolate was born. Mr. Lindt, you are to blame for those extra hours I should be pounding the pavement!

So next time you wander into Starbucks for a hot chocolate or a mochaccino, perhaps pause and give thanks to the clever Mesoamericans for discovering a little thing that has brought joy to many over the centuries.