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The aroma of five different kinds of dark chocolate wafted through Williams Center for the Arts room 108 Friday afternoon as alumni crowded in to learn more about the “food of the gods.”
Nina Gilbert, director of choral activities, had set out plates of five different kinds of chocolate for her talk, “Chocolate Across the Curriculum,” at Reunion College: thick, chunky Jamieson Robust Dark; disc-shaped El Rey Macuro; thin, triangular Valrhona Chuao; smooth, chunky Guittard Colombian Varietal Couverture; and thin, rectangular Castelain Tradition.
“I will try to explain how chocolate relates to history, biology, chemistry—everything in the curriculum,” Gilbert said, powering up her PowerPoint presentation during Reunion Weekend. “I do understand you can’t major in sex or conspiracy studies.”
In less than an hour, as audience members savored their chocolate samples, Gilbert managed to cover chocolate’s influence in areas as diverse as birth traditions (the Mayans and Aztecs anointed newborns with chocolate), geography (the Swiss eat the most chocolate—an average of 22 pounds a year per person); moral values (chocolate desserts come out on the dark side with names like chocolate decadence, death by chocolate, and devil’s food); and medicine (certain chocolate is said to lower the risk of heart disease, lung cancer, prostate cancer, asthma, and Type 2 diabetes).
In addition, she offered an explanation of how beans are fermented, dried, and roasted, including the barefoot 19th-century “cacao dance,” as well as a warning against organic chocolate.
“Politically correct chocolate tastes like cardboard or charcoal,” Gilbert said. “It’s over-roasted.”
Gilbert listed the many flavorings added to chocolate in times past, including chiles, vanilla, herbs, flower petals, sap, honey, and even ambergris—lumps of biliary concretion from the intestines of sperm whales.
These days, Gilbert said, the flavorings are almost as odd, including cheese, curry powder, star anise, violets, fennel, Tellicherry peppercorns, chai spice, and wasabi.
What kinds of additives have people put in chocolate over the years?
There was the poison that Jesuit priests were rumored to have put in a cup of chocolate served to Pope Clement XIV in retaliation for an unfavorable order. There have also been ground peas, rice, and lentils; brick dust; hydrogenated and tropical oils; vanillin; egg yolks; and suet.
Gilbert pointed out that important moments in the history of chocolate include Pope Pius V’s 1569 statement that chocolate is a beverage and can be consumed during a fast, Milton Hershey’s decision to convert his business from caramel to chocolate in 1894, and the invention of white chocolate in 1930.
In the “I Am Not Making This Up” category, Gilbert offered a photo of an advertisement for an edible chocolate bomb filled with “gold chocolate and silver almond dragées.”
“Just light the fuse and stand back,” the ad reads. “The bomb explodes harmlessly, showering the table with goodies.”
And speaking of goodies, Gilbert offered some appealing and not-so-appealing chocolate menu ideas, including chocolate coconut soup, chocolate sushi, and chocolate jasmine ice cream.
“What I would like to see in the future is chocolate coming back as a glamour drink like coffee and tea,” she said wistfully. “And why not decaffeinated chocolate? That hasn’t been done.”