Chapter 12

IN THE LAND OF ROSE AND VILE CREAMS

Jenny Cork, the departing chocolate buyer at Fortnum & Mason, took a tentative nibble at a bonbon she plucked from the box I placed on her desk. She grimaced and pitched the thing into a nearby wastebasket with all the force of Michael Jordan slamming a dunk. I was hardly offended; the whole box followed. I didn’t notice whether she tasted a rose or a violet cream, but one was as bad as the other. And England loves them both with a blind passion.

“It is a very English taste,” she allowed, noting that her own selection at least had a more delicate chocolate couverture with flavors inside that evoked an English garden rather than some kid’s chemistry lab. She was even fond of violet creams from Audrey’s Chocolates in Brighton. But mine, too, had come from a high-end little chocolate shop around the corner, with a faithful clientele dating back generations. It had, in fact, a royal warrant to attest that it was a regular supplier to Her Majesty the Queen.

In culinary matters, Britain labors uphill under a burdensome reputation. All those generations of serving things called bubble and squeak or mushy peas have blurred the reality of a brave new approach to mealtime. With only a little discernment, the pickiest of foodies can find toothsome innovation just about anywhere in the United Kingdom. When it comes to chocolate, however, it still takes some searching. Great Britain, the nation that was the first in the world to eat chocolate back in 1674, today goes for some pretty vile stuff.

Jenny Cork worked hard to balance out the rose and violet creams on Fortnum & Mason shelves. She spent years on a job that had her on a constant prowl across Europe in search of something good. In her basement corner, she went through sample after sample of local offerings, and she tossed 95 percent of them in her trusty garbage pail. But she was hopeful that better times were coming to Britain.

“Criteria have changed a lot in fourteen years,” she said. “The British were very different then, the tastes weren’t sophisticated enough. You didn’t hear about quality chocolate at all. Now people are prepared to try something new, to spend the money for real chocolate. That has enabled us to have Valrhona and Marcolini.”

Still, Jenny acknowledged, domestic artisan chocolatiers were a very rare breed. Even fancy little shops relied heavily on a few large companies with an unremarkable output. The broad British taste runs to commercial candy bars she dismisses as “candle wax in some sort of dark stuff.”

 

 

As time went on, I found some excellent English-made chocolate. Eventually, La Maison du Chocolat and Pierre Marcolini each opened up stores in response to a growing demand for quality. But my initial chocolate tour of London went quickly.

I stopped first at Charbonnel et Walker, which opened for business in a small shop on Bond Street in 1875 and has been in Mayfair ever since. In handsome surroundings, it offers chocolates with the telltale uniformity that suggests passage through automated machines. Its royal warrant hung on the wall, not far from the late Queen Mum’s favorite chocolate mints. Though waxy and oversweet, they were strong enough to excite an aged palate. Several other disappointments followed.

A larger picture grew clear to me at Selfridge’s, the mammoth stone temple to British consumption. As might be expected, it was fully stocked. Display cases offered the usual suspects from the Continent. Red and black Valrhona logos filled one long case, with a sales attendant hovering behind. The best of Britain was there, in stacks and piles. Bendick’s, having given up its shop in Mayfair, was selling its chocolate-covered ginger in a discreet corner.

But the focus was on novelty rather than taste. Odd-shaped chocolate animals and cacao-accented paraphernalia, such as cricket bats, evoked little of the love bean’s distinct charm. And at the center of it all, ringing the island of cash registers, were rows upon rows of industrial junk chocolate. Nearly every package had the legally stipulated admission—in tiny letters on the back of the wrapper—that it contained vegetable fats. This was Michel Chaudun’s worst nightmare.

 

 

A century ago, the Cadburys and the Frys, Quakers with a long view, were pioneers in bringing decent chocolate to the masses in small and colorful packages. But now, defenders of the faith assert, Britain is trying to kill chocolate.

In the mid-1990s, British industry supported a Continent-wide assassination attempt. Against howls of protest from France and Belgium, it succeeded. Pushed by big manufacturers, the European Union ruled that as of August 2003, up to 5 percent of chocolate could contain cheaper vegetable fats. Such substitutes as palm or mango-kernel oil cost five to ten times less than cocoa butter, and more cocoa butter could be sold to eager cosmetics makers.

This was the crisis chocolatiers had evoked in France. Although Britain allowed manufacturers to cut cocoa butter ahead of schedule, EU norm 2000/36/EG was formalized in April of 2003. Real war was still sputtering along in Iraq, but the influential French daily Le Monde gave most of a page to the decisive running battle of Europe’s chocolate war.

“This could lead to a massacre of chocolate,” Isabelle Guenée, secretary general of the French Confederation of Chocolatiers and Confiseurs, told Le Monde. “Today, it is five percent, but nothing guarantees that won’t increase later. Anyway, no current method allows any control of this percentage. If an industrialist seeking profit uses seven percent or ten percent, there is no way to know.”

The fight over substitutions dates back to the 1970s, when Britain, along with Ireland and Denmark, sought to enter the European Economic Community. One of its conditions, adopted in 1973, was that the members, six at the time, sanctify the practice of replacing some cocoa butter with vegetable fat in chocolate.

During 2001, Italy and Spain were ordered by the European Court of Justice to comply with the 1973 regulation. Both countries insisted on requiring labels to say “chocolate derivatives.” But by then, a begrudging compromise had already been reached to be put in place during 2003. The EEC had become the fifteen-member European Union, which would later expand to include twenty-five states, from Portugal to Poland. Franz Fischler, EU commissioner for agriculture and food issues, noted that the old rule in force did not specify what substitute oils could be used or in what quantity. The new law continues to allow 5 percent substitution, but it is limited to six oils known as cocoa butter equivalents (CBEs): palm oil, karate, illipe, sal, kokum, and mango-kernel oil.

Even in France, some people agreed with Fischler.

“This is much ado about nothing,” declared Sylvain Margou, secretary general of the French Chambre Syndicale Nationale des Chocolatiers, a trade group that links producers of all sizes. “Industrialists and artisans won’t modify their recipes at the risk of losing customers.”

But Christian Constant, a Paris fondeur, draped his doorway in black. And if most French and Belgian artisans hollered bloody murder, so did British holdouts who believed in the nobility of cacao. Soon e-mails flew back and forth among them. A planned London chocolate week ought to be canceled, they argued, because not enough producers could present “real chocolate” without lying about it.

In the Tarn, the chocolatier Yves Thuriès sculpted a hundred-pound bust of French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy in real chocolate. He brought it to the ministry in Paris as a reflection of what French fondeurs thought of the EU ruling on substituting vegetable fat. “This is imitation chocolate, surimi chocolate,” Thuriès told reporters. “The EU should have imposed that label or at least required manufacturers to mention the vegetable fat. Instead, it is us who have to justify ourselves by declaring that we use pure cacao without any adulterations.”

The new borderless European Union is having another sort of impact on old-world chocolate. Take Terry’s, formerly of York.

In 1886, Joseph Terry turned his father’s thriving confectionery business toward chocolate. After World War I, his sons joined the business. Terry’s of York was soon beloved for its Chocolate Orange and All Gold chocolate. The Terrys made a point of finding quality beans; they bought a Venezuelan plantation to ensure a supply. The old plant, with its brick clock tower, was a symbol of British spirit. During World War II, it made aircraft propellers instead of chocolate. Many of its workers went to fight.

The catering giant, Forte, bought Terry’s in 1963, followed by Colgate-Palmolive. United Biscuits acquired the company in 1975. And Kraft General Foods took over in 1993, folding the group in with Jacobs Suchard to create Terry’s Suchard. And in 2004, Kraft announced it was closing operations in York, parceling out production to Sweden, Belgium, Slovakia, and Poland.

The problem, the Kraft executive Jonathan Horrell told me, was that the 1920s plant was too cumbersome for modern manufacturing. Instead of building a new one, Kraft decided to use existing capacity in Sweden and Belgium. Some production would go to Bratislava, in Slovakia. And the famed Chocolate Orange would be made in Poland, where wages were far lower than in Western Europe. “We came to the sad conclusion that business was no longer viable in York,” Horrell said. The 316 workers would be paid off well.

In London, The Guardian wrote a stiff editorial, which concluded: “Without being wildly xenophobic, British chocolate tastes better to the British palate too.”

Most likely. In any case, Terry’s of Warsaw lacks that old ring.

 

 

But a little bit of looking produces fine chocolate, British-made and the other kind.

“We’re about chocolate, not chocolates,” Alan Porter said in the small London shop he runs for The Chocolate Society. In English English, that says it all. The plural noun covers the whole subject: candy bars, bonbons, paper-wrapped oddities, molded gimmicks, the works. In the singular, chocolate refers to what Porter describes in self-mocking overstatement as “the magnificence of what fine dark chocolate is all about.”

The Chocolate Society was founded in 1989, and it picked up five thousand members over the next decade. Unlike the Club de Croqueurs de Chocolat in Paris, it is a loose-knit organization that does not take itself too seriously.

“We’re not trying to do anything worldwide,” Porter said. “We’re just a friendly little society. If we asked our members to come to meetings, they wouldn’t. We try to, and it does not happen.” The society also tried setting up demonstrations and tastings as a change of pace at business conventions. That ended up costing too much money. In Britain, proselytizing in the church of chocolate takes a missionary’s zeal.

Porter is not exactly a dark-robed Jesuit, but he is undaunted. His halo of silver curls is almost electric with energy. As often as not, a cellular phone is pressed to one ear. He has that uniquely English capacity to look businesslike and sober while flashing wry humor with a ruffling of eyebrows. Colorful spectacle frames and a lively tie suggest a preference for flair over formality. And he loves to talk chocolate.

“The picture has changed drastically in recent years,” he said. “You can go into ordinary neighborhood delicatessens all over England and find decent dark chocolate. People are starting to understand.”

Porter built a business of importing Valrhona products. He put up with four years of Gallic hauteur before the French company decided to experiment, as Valrhona executives put it, in England. Porter was their lab rat.

These days, Britain imports tons of Valrhona chocolate each year, from professional blocks and chips to the full range of retail chocolate bars. But like Jenny Cork, Porter sees the quality market as a tiny slice of the whole. If real chocolate is to move beyond deli shelves, it will be a struggle.

“It’s still very small,” he said. “The majority of food is bought in supermarkets. We don’t have pâtisseries. The little shops are disappearing as fast as pubs. It’s supermarkets, supermarkets, supermarkets. Our small shopkeepers don’t understand the idea of focusing on a product and developing a clientele for it.”

Porter started out working as a farmer at the age of eighteen but quickly veered into fine food. He trained as a chef and, working his way along through pastry, ended up in chocolate. He had found his bliss and appeared ready to carry on the noble battle.

Chantal Coady is another of Britain’s small band of believers, an original pioneer of The Chocolate Society. She opened her London shop, Rococo, in 1983. Since then she has written a chocolate buyer’s guide and a chocolate cookbook. She also senses a turn toward quality, but like Porter, she cannot quantify it. Eventually, she believes, converts will reach a critical mass.

When Chantal first opened her shop, she relied on a hard core of regulars. “Now people are becoming more aware of the whole issue of chocolate,” she said. “Tastes are changing from white to dark.” Customers listen as she patiently explains nuances, borrowing from the vocabulary of wine. She draws from a prodigious knowledge acquired over years of visiting equatorial plantations and the test kitchens of chocolate alchemists.

From the repeat business, and the occasional out-and-out junkie, Chantal knows she is making new connections. After we spoke, she introduced me to Richard von Geusau, a South African who had read her first book and beat a path to her door. Fired with zeal, he had set up a thriving chocolate business in Cape Town.

“It’s just amazing how fast people learn to appreciate good chocolate once they’re exposed to it,” he said, ticking off the restaurants and fancy food shops in Cape Province that now clamor for his products.

“We find this all the time,” Chantal added. When it comes to good chocolate, converts tend not to backslide. Still, she has to stock rose and violet creams. “That’s what people want most.”

 

 

My favorite fondeur in Britain is Gerry Coleman, a young Irish disciple of Marcolini. He trained in Brussels and then opened L’Artisan du Chocolat near Sloane Square. Meticulous and single-minded, Coleman works long hours with his Belgian wife, Anne-Françoise, at their immaculate lab in Kent.

A handsome little folder explains Coleman’s purpose: “To create the highest quality couture chocolate products in Great Britain and one of the best worldwide.” It also tells the English what they should do with his chocolate: Store it between 14 and 17 degrees Centigrade (about 57 and 63 degrees F), but let it warm a few degrees before eating; start with blended-bean ganache before single-bean specialties, and keep to one geographic region at a time. For infused ganaches, start with subtle and work toward strong. The idea is to appreciate nuances in acidity, bitterness, and mouthfeel.

Most of all, Coleman all but ordered, eat the chocolate within two to three weeks. The sooner the better.

“A superb chocolate is recognized by its strength, its length in the mouth, its balance of taste sensations and interesting textures,” the leaflet explained.

Gerry and Anne-Françoise deliver what they promise at their shop. A palet d’or of Madagascar-type criollo has all the red-fruit muscle of a good wine. Infused ganaches of Earl Grey tea or lavender honey offer a light, fresh taste. There are a lot more choices, including one called Tobacco, by request only, which was suggested by the chef Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck. As Gerry puts it: “First the pipe tobacco flavors of caramel, coffee, and vanilla; then a tickle on the throat and a buzz of the tobacco released.”

Gerry’s L’Artisan du Chocolat soon built a loyal clientele, not only among the neighborhood Sloane Rangers but also with chocophiles who follow their noses halfway across Britain. It does a bustling business with restaurants and hotels. Gordon Ramsey, a fabled English chef, buys it in bulk.

Marcolini himself opened a shop in London, and La Maison du Chocolat came over from Paris and rented spacious quarters just across Piccadilly from Fortnum & Mason. Crowds were not breaking down either of their doors. But Robert Linxe is upbeat about the London venture. Day after day, La Maison remains an empty house, its fresh ganaches and pralinés quietly edging toward sell-by dates in gleaming glass cases. But sales figures show someone is buying that fancy French chocolate.

It is not only the shops. When the Moroccan restaurateur Mourad Mazouz decided to open his imaginative Sketch in London, he enlisted Pierre Gagnaire, my own favorite among France’s three-star chefs. And a main feature of the place, below the main dining room, was a café that specialized in fine chocolate pastries.

In the end, I decided, Britain would be the chocolate bellwether. That is, the success of the world’s cacao revolution could be gauged by the pace at which Britons switch from chocolates to chocolate. This might take generations, but I, for one, am not placing any bets on that. If magret de canard can bump lamb with mint jelly off the restaurant menus, can fine chocolate be far behind?

 

 

On that first visit to Selfridge’s, I found Rita Antoniou next to the Bendick’s Chocolates where she had been, in one way or another, for most of her seventy-plus years. She joined the company when she was twenty. “Now they just keep me around like the furniture,” she said. She had, however, just pounced on me as a likely new customer with all the enthusiasm of a kid trying hard to land her first job.

Rita loved Bendick’s products, and she nearly wept as she described how high rents had forced the company to give up its shop in Mayfair. Still, she said, customers found their way to Selfridge’s to stock up on the bittermints that their grandparents loved. Rita glowed with pride when I mentioned I knew that one of the members of the royal household was a Jack Russell terrier named Bendick.

“People like the chocolates they grew up with,” she said, “and that’s what they stay with.” Plenty of people had told me the same thing at different times in different places. When I tried a favorite of the Bendick line, sweet ginger encased in a flavorless hard chocolate, it seemed clear that some cultural lines were not meant to be crossed. I’d prefer a Hershey’s Kiss any day. But evidence was much stronger that tastes can, and do, change.

I decided to try an experiment. I bought a bar of Michel Cluizel’s Premier Cru d’Hacienda and broke off a chunk for Rita. This was the hard stuff, 66 percent dark chocolate from Venezuela, with no mints or ginger, no rose or violet. Rita tasted it carefully and then smiled. “You know,” she said, “when you finish it, you’ve still got a sensation on the palate. I quite like this. I think I could go stronger.”

 

 

In early 2003, when Jenny Cork moved upstairs to Fortnum & Mason’s cookware department, Chloé moved in. Not exactly. Timid-looking as she is, Chloé is a Franco-Teutonic bombshell. She persuaded the staid management to find her an upstairs window that let in real daylight, rather than the basement cubicle assigned to Confectionery. Then, looking out at Great Britain, she set about attempting to change the national taste in chocolate.

She had the company’s support. That fine old temple of English comestibles had a clear idea in mind when it passed up so many other candidates for the job. Fortnum & Mason decided it was good business to promote the idea that loving good chocolate was different from being addicted to sugar. And Chloé was on the case.

For a while, her e-mails to me reflected optimism. At her tastings, she beamed with satisfaction when people who had grown up on kippers, baked beans, and Cadbury’s Daily Milk bars zeroed in on the dark chocolate creations of her Continental heroes. Early on, she reported: “I just finished my first conference, thirty-five stockbrokers … when after Valrhonas and plain ganaches they came to the violet cream, they said ‘it tastes like soap.’ I was the happiest frog in the room!”

She visited out-of-the-way Italian producers. Soon she struck a deal with Valrhona to import directly from Tain l’Hermitage. She made room for Cluizel and Marcolini, carefully instructing her staff on how to present new tastes to old customers.

And then Chloé began to worry. For one thing, new chocolate fads were doing less to educate palates than to confuse things even more.

“One day, a woman came in and demanded criollo,” Chloé told me. “She was so desperate that she was shaking and could hardly talk.” The woman, as the story emerged, owned a London antiques shop that had nearly gone broke when her mother fell sick several years earlier. Her boyfriend’s father, a very rich American, had written a check that saved her business. She was ready to die for the man. And he was in London, now, just ending a six-week visit.

“The father had just read somewhere that criollo chocolate was the best, and she had to get him some,” Chloé said. “He’d read that it cost so much per gram—she had some number written down—and that’s what she wanted. She wouldn’t listen to my staff, so they called me. I sat her down for fifteen minutes and explained that no one really made pure criollo chocolate. She got more desperate. I showed her my CV and some clippings to prove that I was supposed to be expert. She wasn’t swayed.”

Finally, Chloé went in the back to check packaging for the word criollo. Although chocolate makers threw the term around in conversation, truth in packaging forced most to keep it off their boxes. After a while, Chloé found an Amedei sampler with some high criollo content chocolate.

“The woman grabbed it, but she was still wavering,” Chloé said. “To convince her, I charged a price that was three times higher than the real one. And she left happy.”

When she started the job, Chloé took a hard look at Fortnum & Mason’s untouchable major suppliers. In examining their recipes, she said, she discovered that even Britain’s top-range manufacturers often do not use cream or milk. They mix substitute fats with water and inferior chocolate, often with chemical preservatives, to boost shelf life.

“I talked to companies and tried to persuade them at least to use a better quality of chocolate base,” Chloé said. “Barry Callebaut makes a wide range, and if they insisted on going there, they could spend a little more and get something better. But it turned out that demand for quality was so low in England that Barry Callebaut stopped marketing its more expensive chocolate. If you’re a young chocolatier just starting out, testing the samples on offer, you won’t even get to taste good chocolate.”

Chloé was starting to steam. “Look, I have nothing against fudge or rose and violet creams as long as you regard them as candy,” she said. “But real chocolate demands to be fresh. Fortnum and Mason won’t consider stocking products with less than six months’ shelf life because that’s what customers are used to. Maybe if they replaced those wooden counters with refrigerators, people would start to understand.”

Champagne truffles put Chloé over the top. They are one of Britain’s best-loved chocolate delicacies; when I mentioned them she had to pause a moment to catch her breath. In France or Belgium, Champagne truffles last no more than a few weeks before the cream inside starts to turn. “Here you can keep them for nine months,” she wrote me. “To give you an idea: the Champagne truffle, bestseller by far. Composition: long-life milk or plain chocolate, vegetable fat, sugar, white rum, sorbic acid, marc de Champagne (1.85%). The vegetable fat is partially hydrogenated [and] consists of rapeseed, palm, soya, and coconut. Bon appétit.”

At one point, store executives put together a sampler they wanted to call Chloé’s Choice. She wanted to slip a note in each one saying, “I wouldn’t touch this stuff.” But, more than anything specific, it was a function of why the Frenchman’s slur for the English is “les rosbifs.” Food, she believes, is not their thing.

“They’re not learning,” Chloé concluded. “You can see it in the sales figures. Lindor is one of the most popular items. It’s good, but you can’t taste a cocoa bean in it. When people do eat dark chocolate, they buy Green and Black, a Fair Trade brand. The idea is noble, but it isn’t good chocolate. This is not taste, it’s politics.”

 

 

In the end, Chloé decided to give up her dream job. After a year at Fortnum & Mason, she abandoned her optimism and made plans to try to work on Americans instead.

“This country is not ready to understand six weeks’ shelf life. The elite who wants something good usually buys their chocolate abroad. Maybe that might change, but I’m not waiting. Whatever happens in the United States will take at least ten years to reach the United Kingdom. It’s just because they don’t have a clue what food means. Punto.”

That was a bit sweeping, considering what now comes out of the best kitchens in London and the hinterlands beyond. But as far as chocolate is concerned, a train ride through the Channel tunnel still seems to be the best bet.