Chocolate: Food of the Gods?

Then they are sun-dried for a week or so, roasted, and ground into chocolate liquor. That liquor is molded into blocks to make unsweetened baking chocolate. For the ready-to-eat variety, other ingredients, such as extra cocoa butter, sugar, milk, and vanilla are added. Then the chocolate is "conched" (blasted with fresh air) to rid it of excess moisture and improve the flavor.

For cocoa powder, most of the cocoa butter is removed. It often finds its way into cosmetic products like face-creams and sun-lotions.

The original cacao, called criollo ("indigenous") is the highest quality, but also the rarest. A hardier, faster-growing type known as forestero ("foreign") produces most of our chocolate these days.

In the good old days, it was used medicinally to fatten patients, as a stimulant, and to improve the digestion. Although chocolate was once considered something of a vice, we have recently learned that it doesn't seem to raise cholesterol levels. It also contains the same polyphenol antioxidants that tea does, but in even higher quantity. (Dark chocolate and cocoa have the most.)

So this indulgence could theoretically help fight cancer and heart disease. One controversial study even claims that chocolate eaters live a year longer than everybody else. I am willing--no, eager--to believe it! Of course, with all that fat and sugar, it's still a stretch to call chocolate good for you. Most of us don't eat it for our health anyway, but for pure pleasure.

As the Marquise de Sevigne wrote in 1677, "If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?"

Note: Plates are from Kohler's Medizinal Pflanzen, courtesy of the Missouri Botanical Garden Library at http://www.mobot.org

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