The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [45]
Chocolate’s bad reputation may have come in part from reports from Mexico, where chocolate seemed a potent drug because the Aztecs mixed it with hallucinogenic mushrooms to drink in religious ceremonies. In any event, for chocolate’s first European century, its unsavory reputation grew along with its popularity. In 1628, the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo wrote, “There came the devil of tobacco and the devil of chocolate, which . . . avenged the Indies against Spain, for they had done more harm by introducing among us those powders and smoke and chocolate cups and chocolate beaters than the King had ever done through Columbus or Cortés and Almagreo and Pizarro. For it was better and cleaner and more honorable to be killed by a musket ball or a lance than by snuffing and sneezing and belching and dizziness and fever.”
Time has shown him right about the tobacco, though more than a little unfair to chocolate. But in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both were regarded as vile habits the Basques had picked up in America. A seventeenth-century Englishman in San Sebastián wrote that the locals “wake up and have a chocolate, and wouldn’t leave without it even if their house were on fire.”
What happened to Cortés’s third recipe, the paste? When he returned with beans and recipes, the court entrusted them to a monastery. The monks of Guajaca softened the beans and mixed them with cane sugar, which was itself a new food at the time. The Spanish crown immediately realized the commercial value of this new confection and attempted to keep the formula secret. For almost a century the Spanish were able to keep chocolate making exclusively Iberian.
Their secret chocolate was a peculiar brick-red block. Since chocolate was American, the Spanish seasoned it with other new American foods including hot peppers and vanilla. The reddish color came from annatto, the dye that Caribbeans rubbed on their bodies, giving birth to the term redskins. And since chocolate was an exotic food, they added other exotic foods to it such as cinnamon, anise, and nuts.
It was the Inquisition that ruined the Spanish monopoly on chocolate confection. During the sixteenth century the Portuguese had quietly discovered chocolate making in Brazil, but they were not sharing their discovery with the rest of Europe either. However, Jews, driven to Portugal by the Inquisition, learned the craft while there. From Portugal, the Jews migrated to Bayonne—St. Esprit, the ghetto across the river and out of Basqueland.
The fame of the Jewish chocolate makers of St. Esprit spread throughout both sides of Basqueland and into the rest of France. At first the town fathers thought chocolate making was a low and immoral trade and barred it from Bayonne proper. But the chocolate makers were already barred from the city because they were Jews. Those who wanted the evil chocolate went to St. Esprit. After the French Revolution guaranteed Jews the full rights of citizenship, Jews moved into town, and the city of Bayonne has been boasting of its “Bayonne chocolates” ever since.
In the 1970s, Robert Linxe, a native of Bayonne, became one of the leading chocolate makers of Paris, founding the Maison du Chocolate. He offered this recipe from his native city:
Take 1 liter of heavy cream and bring it to a boil. Pour it slowly over 3 pounds 12 ounces of semibitter chocolate until the chocolate melts. Whisk it like mayonnaise until thickened. Add 3 1/2 ounces of softened, high-quality butter.
Remove pits from Itxassou cherries and put the cherries through a food mill until a fine pulp is produced. Heat the pulp, add a little alcohol (brandy or local fruit alcohol), and reduce the liquid. Incorporate in the chocolate mixture. Chill it. Then cut it in pieces and dip in melted couverture (covering chocolate). That’s a bit difficult. But you can always shape it into balls and roll them in cocoa powder as truffles.
[Linxe sometimes mixes