Coming Out Swiss

by Anne Herrmann

  Chocolate

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  The Facts

  Switzerland leads the world in annual per capita consumption of chocolate, 22.7 pounds, although 20 percent of this figure includes tourists and cross-border commuters. Of this, 75 percent is milk chocolate, which in the EU means a minimum of 25 percent cocoa solids and in the United States a minimum of 10 percent cocoa solids.

  Americans consume 11.6 pounds per capita per year, although the United States leads in cacao bean imports and chocolate production. The “confectionary coating” on a Baby Ruth candy bar, named after the youngest daughter of President Grover Cleveland, has replaced so much of the cocoa butter with vegetable oil that technically it cannot be called chocolate.

  Chocolate is currently not about consumption but about tasting, which involves passion, connoisseurship, and rejecting the chocolate candies of your childhood. Tasting tips: Avoid coffee, tea, and mint before tasting, and taste in the morning or late afternoon, when you are just a little hungry. Taste each chocolate at least twice, and taste no more than seven to ten items. Between chocolates, drink room-temperature water and eat plain bread to de-fat the tongue.

  The connoisseur has relegated Swiss chocolate to the status of a supermarket brand. In 1989 Lindt launched a 70 percent chocolate bar, making it the first supermarket brand to promote cocoa percentage. In 1992 it issued the first “country of origin” bar. Frey chocolate, the brand of Migros, the largest retailer in Switzerland, has appeared on the shelves at Target.

  Cailler is the oldest Swiss brand of chocolate still in existence. François-Louis Cailler (1796–1852), like many Swiss chocolatiers, learned his craft in Turin. Unlike chocolatiers from the Ticino and the Grisons who leave Switzerland to open businesses in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Hamburg, Paris, London, or St. Petersburg, Cailler returns to Vevey in 1819 to open a mechanized chocolate factory. In 1875 his son-in-law Daniel Peter succeeds in creating the first milk-chocolate bar, called Gala Peter, by adding condensed milk. Made with much milk and little sugar, the chocolate bar not only provides a new use for Swiss milk and a way to distribute it worldwide but is marketed as nutritional for mountaineers and travelers. A friend of Henri Nestlé markets condensed milk as healthier for city dwellers and colonists than raw milk from tubercular cows potentially adulterated by contaminated water. Beginning in 1904, Nestlé markets Peter’s chocolate worldwide, and by 1929 Cailler has become part of the Nestlé group.

  In 1753 Linnaeus gives the scientific name Theobroma cacao, “food of the gods,” to the cocoa tree. The tree grows only twenty degrees north and twenty degrees south of the equator in the damp, shaded understory of coconut palms and banana plants. Here midges, necessary to pollinate its flowers, thrive. The pod, which holds thirty to forty seeds, is attached directly to the trunk in a pattern known as “cauliflory.” The pod never falls or opens of its own accord. Machetes are needed, or monkeys, who are seeking not the bean but the surrounding white mucilage, a sweet pulp. Fermentation, drying, roasting, and winnowing are necessary to transform beans into cocoa “nibs,” which are milled to create cocoa liquor. Over half the nib is fat, extracted by means of a process called “Dutching.” Cocoa butter is coveted for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, while the remaining presscake can be pulverized into cocoa powder.

  Alkaloids make up 1 to 2 percent of the cocoa bean in the form of caffeine and theobromine, known to stimulate the brain and central nervous system.

  The Spanish learn of cacao not from the Aztecs but from the Maya, on the Pacific slopes of Chiapas and Guatemala, who, a thousand years before the Spaniards land, pour a dark liquid from one jar into another to produce foam, considered the most desirable part of the drink.

  The pre-Conquest Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico count rather than weigh cocoa beans. Maize is added to chocolate drinks, as well as chili, vanilla, and black pepper. Drinking chocolate is enjoyed only by elites, served at the end of a meal in calabash cups.

  Columbus never tasted chocolate, but on his fourth voyage he discovered the gold he had been looking for on the island of Guanaja in a canoe full of “almonds” used as money.

  The Spanish in Mesoamerica insist on drinking chocolate hot, introducing cane sugar, adding familiar spices such as cinnamon and anise, and beating the hot chocolate with a large wooden stick or molinillo to produce foam. Cocoa liquor is stored and shipped or issued to soldiers in the form of a wafer or tablet to which one can add sugar and water.

  Cocoa arrives in Europe as a medicine “appreciated for its taste, its filling nature, and its stimulation.” It is reputed to be mood enhancing and to aid digestion.

  It arrives at the Spanish court as a hot beverage, although the cup now has a saucer with a ring, to prevent it from slipping, and a spoon, to stir the chocolate when it settles.

  Is chocolate a drink or a food? Does it or does it not break the ecclesiastical fast?

  The Italians add flavors like musk, lemon peel, and ambergris; the French invent the chocolatière or silver chocolate pot, with a straight wooden handle at a right angle to the spout and a hole in a hinged lid for the moussoir, or froth-maker.

  Tea, coffee, and chocolate arrive in England simultaneously. Tea is the most expensive; coffee provides the most stimulation.

  By the time the European market doubles the need for chocolate, the indigenous population in Mesoamerica has plummeted. In 1537 Pope Paul III vows to excommunicate any Christian who enslaves an Indian. Planters on the Guayaquil coast of Ecuador and in Venezuela step in to supply Guatemalan and Mexican markets. African slaves replace Indians in the cacao groves. The fast-growing and disease resistant forastero bean replaces the more aromatic but lower-yielding criollo bean. In Trinidad the two beans are hybridized to produce trinitario.

  Today, the Ivory Coast is the leading producer of cocoa beans, a legacy of nineteenth-century French forastero cocoa plantations. Most cocoa is grown by peasant farmers who have never tasted chocolate: it is too expensive and it liquefies too quickly. “Blood cocoa” funds an enduring civil war that allows both governmental officials and rebels to buy weapons with revenue from cocoa production. Children from Mali are smuggled in as slave laborers, increasing the gap “between the hand that picks the bean and the hand that unwraps the candy” (Off, Bitter Chocolate).

  Chocolate has been a favorite disguise for poison.

  In eighteenth-century Europe, chocolate is seen as southern, Catholic, and aristocratic while coffee is northern, Protestant, and middle class. Chocolate is identified with papal and/or royal absolutism while tea symbolizes civilization and liberty.

  In 1847 J. S. Fry & Sons produces the first chocolate for a mass market, the chocolate bar, by blending cocoa beans and sugar with melted cocoa butter to make a paste that can be cast into a mold. English Quakers promote chocolate drinking as an alternative to drinking gin. Fry supplies the Royal Navy, while Cadbury becomes the purveyor of chocolate to Queen Victoria. In 1868 Cadbury offers the first decorated chocolate box, which remains long after the chocolates are gone; in 1875 Cadbury introduces the first chocolate Easter egg, making chocolate an integral part of the most important celebration on the Christian calendar.

  In 2007 Cadbury is fined £1 million for putting unsafe chocolate on sale. Chocolate and salmonella go well together. The abundant fat, low moisture levels, and high sugar content help preserve the bacteria. In Europe there are two or three chocolate-based salmonella outbreaks every decade.

  Godiva, founded in Brussels after World War II, claims to be “The World’s Best Chocolate,” and many people think it is. In 1974 it is bought by Campbell’s, which then promptly tries to sell the brand, which has never fit its product line. In 2006 Hershey buys Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker and Dagoba Organic Chocolate and in 2007 Consumer Reports–trained panelists taste fourteen dark chocolate bars and choose Hershey’s Cocoa Reserve Extra Dark with Cocoa Nibs as the winner. Milton Hershey’s great-grandfather flees persecution as a Mennonite in Switzerland and settles in Pennsylvania.

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sp; The Kekchi Maya of Guatemala introduce chocolate to Prince Philip of Spain in 1544. In the 1990s, the Maya of Belize are persuaded to abandon the hybrid cocoa trees introduced by Hershey and return to their semi-wild trees to produce Maya Gold for Green & Black’s, the first chocolate brand declared a “free-trade” product.

  Chocolate has a high concentration of antioxidants, diffusing free radicals that cause premature aging. Dark chocolate has twice as many antioxidants as milk chocolate and the same number of flavonoids as red wine and green tea, said to reduce risks of heart attack and cancer.

  Knowledge about production has become a requirement for the consumption of prestige cultural goods. Today chocolate labels indicate cocoa percentage (weight from cocoa beans), country of origin (anywhere in the country), plantation (never more than five acres), bean variety (criollo is always a hybrid of criollo and trinitario), and vintage (year of the cocoa crop).

  In 1997 Domori, a chocolatier from Genoa, buys a plantation in Venezuela, where he replants criollo trees by grafting them onto trinitario, using seeds from a gene bank in Trinidad. The first “pure criollo” bar appears in 2003.

  “White chocolate” is not chocolate but rather cocoa butter, and therefore confectionary.

  The most significant improvement to chocolate making is conching, invented—both the process and the machine—by Rodolphe Lindt, in 1879. Conching kneads the chocolate for up to three days, causing it to be aerated, thereby helping aromas to develop, acids to evaporate, and the texture to become smoother. Since then the greatest technological progress has been in packing: “Where in the past women stood at long tables, and later conveyor belts, carefully placing chocolates in boxes, today robots do the same job in a fraction of the time. Attentive staff check and correct the work of robots” (Chocosuisse, Chocology). In 1899 Lindt sells his factory in Bern, his brand name, and his secret production process to Sprüngli of Zürich.

  In 1845 Rodolf Sprüngli-Ammann opens the first chocolate factory in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. In 1859 Confiserie Sprüngli, which in 1892 separates from the factory Lindt und Sprüngli, opens on the Paradeplatz in Zürich. In 1970 it opens the first outlet in a shopping mall. All outlets must be within an hour of its manufacturing plant in Dietikon to ensure the quality of its chocolates, made with fresh cream. Its best known and most popular product is not chocolate but tiny meringue macaroons in dozens of flavors called Luxemburgerli, named after the place of origin of the young confectioner who begins making them in Zürich in 1958. Luxemburgerli, like truffes du jour, must be sold within twenty-four hours of production.

  Quevedo Bittersweet: “Quevedo’s extremely dark color foreshadows its powerful but flowery chocolate taste. The intensity of this rarified Forastero varietal produces rich, green forest, tea and slight nut flavors with a lingering banana and pound cake finish” (according to a Guittard chocolate wrapper). These are taste notes. Make sure you taste the chocolate before you read the notes. To find your own words, look for associations with the world around you. What natural products, such as fruit, flowers, woodlands, or spice, does the taste remind you of?

  Toblerone, invented in 1908, is the most famous of all Swiss chocolates. Forrest Mars learns what he needs to make the Mars Bar by working on the Toblerone factory floor.

  Chocosuisse, the Union of Swiss Chocolate Manufacturers, defends itself against the misuse of the “Swiss chocolate” label. “Swiss chocolate” must refer to chocolate products manufactured only at production sites in Switzerland. Good chocolate, according to Chocosuisse, “melts like butter, does not stick to the roof of the mouth or feel gritty, and leaves hardly any aftertaste” (Chocology).

  The heyday of the Swiss chocolate industry, between 1890 and 1920, coincides with the golden age of Swiss tourism. Visitors from around the world spread the word. Lindt aimed his advertising at exclusive girls’ schools in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. By 1912 Switzerland had cornered 55 percent of the world’s chocolate-export market.

  Of worldwide cocoa bean harvests, 1 percent ends up in Switzerland, and 57 percent of its chocolate is exported.

  The EU allows chocolate to contain up to 5 percent other vegetable fat, which until now no Swiss producer has taken advantage of.

  Venezuela and Ecuador are the first bean-producing countries that manufacture high-quality chocolates and successfully export them, the El Rey and the Vintage Plantations brands, respectively; this is otherwise known as “bean to bar.”

  In 1860 Etienne Guittard boards a ship for San Francisco, bringing with him his uncle’s chocolates from Lyons, which he hopes to exchange for gold-mining supplies. Wealthy miners are willing to pay premium prices for them, and after three years of failing to find gold, he opens a shop on Samsone Street. Guittard is the oldest family-owned chocolate company in America. Ghirardelli, who also arrives in California during the Gold Rush, gives his name to a company now owned by Lindt.

  We reach for chocolate when we feel a little hungry; when doing housework, out for a walk, during the rigors of military service. Chocolate has even ventured into space with astronauts and cosmonauts. You can always rely on chocolate. It does not make you “high,” is not addictive, and contains no hallucinogenic substances. No allergies to cocoa have yet been recorded. (Chocosuisse, Chocology)

  Cailler is a small Swiss brand, whose exports make up only 5 percent of its sales, owned by Nestlé, the largest food and beverage company in the world. In 2006 a French architect, Jean Nouvel, is commissioned to revitalize Cailler’s look, which he does by creating translucent PET wrappers for bars wrapped in colored foil. A French-Swiss consumer group discovers that a 100-gram Frigor bar wrapped in 50 grams of packaging produces five times more nonrecyclable waste than the old packaging did. This in addition to an 8 percent price increase. Denner, a discount retailer, refuses to stock the chocolates, and the Swiss refuse to buy them, and sales plummet by 20 percent. What the Swiss reject as a higher-priced and over-packaged bar, international consumers might embrace as the latest luxury from Switzerland.

  The language of chocolate has borrowed its terminology from the language of wine, in particular from the internationally accepted reference standard of French wines. Because of its complex chemical composition and its ritualized consumption, chocolate remains distinguished by the need for “an apprenticeship in taste” (Terrio, Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate).

  To be invited “to go to the king’s morning chocolate” (aller au chocolat) was to enjoy royal favor and social status; to be like chocolate (être chocolat) was to be deceived or to play the fool. To act like chocolate (faire le chocolat) meant to be naive or gullible and to court numerous social risks, from deception to death. The noun chocolat has long signaled not only a tropical foodstuff, but men of African descent. (Terrio, Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate)

  In the 1980s the French become leaders in chocolate connoisseurship by setting a new standard of taste. Although not known historically for luxury chocolates, to increase consumption, its chocolatiers begin to celebrate an artisanal craftsmanship and aesthetic. Grand cru marks a reeducation of the palate by privileging dark chocolate over mass-produced milk chocolate. Dark chocolate is marketed as distinctly French, whereas the origins of milk chocolate are placed outside of France, in the United States and Switzerland. By marketing dark chocolate as better, both in terms of taste and healthfulness, because it has less sugar, France continues a tradition of principles established by nouvelle cuisine.

  Chocolate-covered pretzels are an Amish Christmas tradition.

  The Fictions

  The most popular fictions about chocolate, apart from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), have been written by, for, and about women: Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies (1989) and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat: A Novel (1999). These books, made into highly successful films, offer female-centered histories that assume the primacy of
the mother-daughter relationship. In Chocolat, the mother-daughter dyad is positioned as the most reliable, even when threatened by church doctrine that seeks to run the mother out of town, and in Esquivel as the most restricting, cemented by a family tradition upheld by the mother that prohibits marriage for the youngest daughter. In both cases, in the absence of the father, the daughter is too much on the move or too confined to the kitchen, while the mother continues to pay for a sexual transgression and provide for her progeny.

  The chronologies of these novels are seasonal, the chapters marked by dates that succeed each other with predictability yet are punctuated by ceremonial occasions. Food is prepared either for daily consumption or for commemorative gift exchange. In Mexico, chocolate enters recipes with chilies, onions, and almonds; in France, it takes confectionary form. In either case, it mediates the relations that provide for alternative communities, primarily female homosocial ones, while exposing the male-headed household as perpetually elusive, if not inherently bankrupt.

  In Mexico, chocolate is made into squares, dissolved in hot water and beaten until covered with foam. To be “like water for chocolate” is to be “on the verge of boiling over,” to be enraged. Tita is enraged at having to forego marriage, at having to live with her lover as his sister-in-law. She rejects a family tradition that keeps the youngest daughter obedient to her mother for life. By learning to cook, by nursing her nephew, she joins the servant class.

  In France, chocolate is grated, melted, tempered, from blocks of couverture, and made into squares whose names are reminiscent of the aristocratic culture of the ancien régime. Chocolates are sold over the counter in boutiques with elaborate window displays, where candies are treated like jewels. Easter is the privileged moment for expensive confectionary purchases; chocolate competes with the church for the souls of its parishioners. In Chocolat, Vianne, for whom Catholic doctrine is synonymous with patriarchal law, lives by the credo that “chocolate, I am told, is not a moral issue.”