Brown beauty

If I had to have a nickname on an instant messenger, it would be something to do with my almost-top-favourite food: chocolate. Why ‘almost’? Simply because there is always hope for me to find something I like eating more than I like eating chocolate. French fries come close. Dahi-chawal, our very own soothe food that is perhaps our strongest national characteristic, with its cooling blend of yoghurt and rice, is even closer. And there are many other favourites jostling for ascendance, from the delicious methi-and-peas combination my mother made and the from-scratch lasagne that my father excels in, to the cheese smothered enchiladas that Karen whips up for me. And there have been many other gustatory delights that have littered the landscape of my gourmandisation, from my first bite of spanakopita in Athens to that scoop of Rainforest Crunch ice-cream in Denver to the roast beef and watercress sandwiches in Tunbridge Wells to the Brie-stuffed roll in Lyon, to….sigh!

But, as I was saying, the topmost in this very long list is chocolate, for now, at least. It is soothing to nerves jangled by anything from commuting to work to over-passed deadlines to PMS to a blistering shoe-bite. It is perfect during a long morning struggle with a blog that just refuses to behave and write itself as it normally does. And for an after-dessert-after-dinner morsel, it can’t be beat! And it is amazingly versatile stuff – you can eat it as is, you can cook delicious puddings with it, you can pillow it in pastry, you can smother it over chicken, grate it into coffee, shard it over fruit, melt it into fondue, freeze it into ice-cream. Whatever you do to it, it tends to be soul satisfyingly scrumptious.

One of my best memories of chocolate and its intricate construction is something I have never found after I turned 20. We lived in Geneva, Switzerland, and every school morning I would hike over to the main road to catch the bus to the tram stop en route to the Ecole Internationale. At the corner, near the bus stop, was a small stand that sold everything from Gauloises to Playboy. Just after getting my weekly pocket money, I would stop by the stall, chat with the cheery vendor and go my happy way with a few less francs but a few more calories in the form of a delicious Lindt Frione chocolate bar. This was a slab of manna from the famed chocolatier, with airy, bubbly chocolate spangled through with crunchy bits of nougat. The best part was that you could feel each bite melt into a soft-crunchy melange in your mouth, but you couldn’t see any of the nougat, which made it all the more exciting.

Some years later, a trip to the Ghirardelli factory in San Francisco (described in a previous episode) was a high point. But before that, my buddy Karen and I went on a drive into the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, with a stop in the bustling ghost town of Central City. While the old town is ruined, abandoned by miners many years earlier, the tourist trap some distance away is a tangle of up-and-down streets, punctuated by a scramble of ticky-tacky souvenir shops. Those, in turn, are alternated with small stalls and hole-in-the-wall stores selling fresh fudge that is, truly, to die for. While the smell in these shops can be sickeningly overwhelming, the fudge is not. It seduces your mouth, leaving it craving for more…and more. Karen and I furtively munched on the sweet brown stuff in the car all the way home, feeling guilty about not worrying about calories, but pleased beyond description about those same calories that we were not worrying about.

Since then, there have been a few encounters with chocolate that I cannot remember without a slurp and a longing sigh. There is the delightful fudge at the Chocolate Wheel in Delhi, the chocolate-centred gulab jamuns that my friend Rocky created for me, the home-made morsels that Thereza cooks up by the kilo, the truffles from Pure Sin in Mumbai, the chocolate pancake mix Karen sent over from Denver…forgive me, I have to go raid my stash of chocolate!