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Saturday, October 22, 2005
How do you like you chocolate
By Carmen Urbina
How do you like your chocolate?
Do you like it as a river flowing through your veins? Sweet, brown high-octane fuel that perks up your sleepy senses most mornings when the rumpled bed coyly beckons you to linger? Is that how you want your chocolate?
Some of us like our chocolate thick as honey and stick-to-the-ribs hot. Boil the native tablets of chocolate and stir briskly. Pour into tiny cups.
Oh, foolish us. We greedily sip. Tongues singed, eyes smarting from the heat, we learn to sip the dark liquid after the first misadventure. The brew is a better teacher than coffee.
Some of you like your chocolate in a bar, thick boullions chockfull of slivered almonds that add texture to the bite. Chilled, could anything be as perfect?
Children are wont to save the nuts; suspend the sweet anticipation in their hearts.
Those children who can stay their hands, those of them who learn to control the impulse to surrender to the temptation to devour the sweet, turn out more successful in life when they grow up.
A study revealed this, a sage-like prediction from the mouth of men of science, that children with high emotional intelligence (or emotional quotient) do better even when they only have average intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is defined as “a kind of intelligence or skill that involves the ability to perceive, assess and positively influence one’s own and other people’s emotions.”
Science did it with marshmallows but who cares. Sweets have a place in our lives, quotient or no quotient.
How do you like your chocolate so far?
Rose, a friend, says, “In crystals, in granules, spooned into my waiting tongue. I sometimes even dream of chocolate slowly melting, flooding my mouth with a taste so sublime. It brings memories of my youth when eating raw chocolate powder was verboten and recidivists expected a smart spanking on the butt. But it was worth it.”
How do I like my chocolate?
My heart is too fickle to settle on one way. It’s too fancy-free to declare “the find-to-die-for” when I sample a bonbon rippled with butterscotch.
No matter how sinfully satiating (but not in the lane that sends you packing to Gehenna), one way can’t make my heart cease in searching for Earth’s bounty, her myriad colors and subtlety of flavors.
There are many matters to decide on in one day, decisions that will seal my tomorrow, so how can I stop with one chocolate?
Let me tarry. Bring me a sampler in a tin box, pretty and lady-like, painted with multi-colored pansy flowers; flowers that remind me of the wizened face of a man. So endearing pansies.
Let me glory in the tartness of red berries, swim in the headiness of liquor-filled morsels, the snap of nuts when my molars crunch into them.
Let me hear and taste the Earth through a tray of chocolates in dainty shapes that hide a treasure. That to me is my secret feast of life.
(October 22, 2005 issue)
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