o, I admit it-- I'm a snob about many food items, including premium ice cream, the best pizza, and sushi. But there's one area where I can't agree with the supposed connoisseurs: chocolate.
Today's chocolate elite favors pure dark chocolate with a minimum of 70% cocoa (see Bill Buford's "Extreme Chocolate" in the 10/29/07 New Yorker for starters). Even in less sophisticated publications, when the subject of chocolate arises, dark chocolate is favored over milk, nuts and chews over soft centers. It's like some inside agreement on the part of the entire media that dark chocolate is for the worldy and cosmopolitan, while the fans of milk chocolate are tasteless gluttons, i.e. fat losers.
What's wrong with these people?
It's time to make a stand for the gourmand's chocolate, the chocolate of the masses: the milk chocolate soft center truffle, specifically as concocted by See's. My all-time favorite See's candy is the Milk Chocolate Bordeaux, followed closely by the Milk Buttercream. This chocolate is smooth on the tongue and quickly melts into a delicious creamy blur of wonder. It's sugary and rich like hot cocoa made with full-fat milk, a delight in a contemporary food world that favors sharp, acidic flavors that, should you not like them, seem to taunt you for being a pussy.
I grew up on See's Candies, and to this day my grandparents send me a pound of custom mix milk chocolate soft centers approximately four times a year (Valentine's, my birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas). Finding the rectangular box in the mail is like receiving a big fat love letter, except one that is perfectly sweet every time and won't make you blush should you share it with other people. My college roommates grew extra chummy whenever a box arrived (back then, it was two pounds-- after graduation, I had to ask my grandparents to scale it back). Natives of Florida, they were unaware of See's until they met me, and I am proud to have shown them the light. . . chocolate.
No matter what the epicures deem trendy, I plan to stay true to my "impure" love. If preferring old-fashioned creamy goodness to the industry's whip-cracking purebreds makes me some kind of chocolate-redneck, so be it.
I know exactly where to turn for consolation.
1 comment:
Good writer.
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