CHOCOLATE! 31/3/07

This entry is all about chocolate. Any of you who may be of a strict Christian persuasion and approaching the end of a wilderness of Lenten abstinence, look away now. I wouldn't want to tempt you. For myself I confess to mild and occasional Buddhist tendencies on the well-proved principle that Heaven helps she who helps herself. God ought to be, I reason, too busy with the great tragedies of the world to concern himself with a simple changeling like me.

Like, for instance, the tragic tendency of the Aztecs, who discovered the wonders of the cocoa bean - and now their Mexican descendants - to mix chocolate with meat. For, by a mile, the greatest gastronomic cacophony I have ever been forced to eat was a cold stew of chicken and dark chocolate served up in the darkness of a Cuban power cut by the Mexican ambassador. That perhaps is a story for another day; meanwhile, on with the chocolate motley.

I blame Mireille Guiliano, myself: she being the elegant and slim-line author of 'French Women Don't Get Fat' - a book of eminently practical dietary advice, though I have yet to try her own version of the Lenten fast, which consists of eating nothing but leek soup for a whole 48 hour weekend. She deems the experience magical. This may be The Land of the Leek, but even so I remain deeply suspicious.

Her theory says that you will find your natural, youthful weight by eating, within reason, anything you like provided you don't eat too much of it and provided that what you do eat is balanced, of good quality and in season. This includes finishing your meals with a small square of dark chocolate. Whoopee!

It must have been that bulging waist-line time of New Year that I blundered upon Mireille's little book and by one of those happy coincidences our local Spar began selling Green and Black's Dark Organic 70 per cent Cocoa-solid Chocolate. This, reasoned my shamefully beguiling little brain, was the way to slim.

Three months later and with considerable sums invested in Mr Green and Black's benevolent fund, I am no slimmer. Worse, I have developed a quite insatiable addiction to the silky bitter-sweetness of dark organic chocolate.

Then the other night returning late from some rehearsal, swaying with fatigue, I collapsed on the sofa and fell asleep in front of the television. When I awoke, there was Juliet Binoche, hair beautifully coiffed and in full make-up, struggling to bring the decadence of her chocolate confections to a town from which they had hitherto been banned by the attentions of a zealous priest and the town's bigoted and misogynist mayor.

It was, of course, the film 'Chocolat,' which also starred our very own Dame Judy Dench. Watching Juliet Binoche, beaming with that smile peculiar to French women that manages to combine deference and self-assurance in equal measure, up to her alabaster elbows in melted chocolate, stirred something in Fennie's tired old brain. If she could make chocolates - so could I.
So it was that last night we were expecting a theatre friend to supper when I (who have never made a chocolate in my life) suddenly felt inspired to do so - a fancy finishing treat to serve after the plain apple pie bought in haste from the WI market.

After all, as Jane Shilling reflected in her Times2 column yesterday: there's nothing quite like baking a cake or planting a lettuce to take your mind off the imagined imperfections of your person. Making chocolates, I felt, must follow a close third.

Soon I was melting the Green and Black confection in a bowl over boiling water while simultaneously chopping the irregular lumps in our crystallised ginger jar into neat little cubes. With no time even to Google the word 'chocolate,' I just guessed at quantities, mixed them together, fished them out with great difficulty, sprinkled them with icing sugar to hide the imperfections and left them to set.

These were not chocolates, you understand, that would have won a prize in any competition open to anyone older than about three. But they were my chocolates and I felt fiercely proud and proprietorial about them. I too had become a 'Chocolatier' or maybe even a 'Chocolatière' - though as that makes me sound like a species of teapot I shall just call myself a Maker of Chocolates.

Come the denouement. The chocolates were wheeled out. Our friend carefully selected one and bit into it, chewing expressively. Fennie beamed with expectation.

"I'm sorry," he said, matter of factly, "but I don't like ginger."

The smile on Fennie's face continued to be pure Juliet Binoche, but inside her head the sound of heels drumming on the floor continued for a very long time.