Chocolate

The New York Times recently had a wondeful feature about the differences between British and American chocolate bars. They writer interviewed several people who had moved from the UK to the USA and were now left with a perpetual craving for chocolate; as well as people who had gone the other way and who had been shocked by the difference in quality.

I'm talking, of course, about regular everyday bars of chocolate. Compare Smarties to M&Ms, Milky Ways to Mars Bars, or, and I find myself loathe even to put these in the same clause, Hershey's to Cadbury's.

The reviewer then gave pieces of Hershey's milk chocolate and Cadbury's Dairy Milk to several randomly chosen New Yorkers, and asked for their opinions. All were ecstatic about the Cadbury bar, saying that it made the ... other one ... taste powdery and bland.

So far, so what? Not so much a new opinion as a satement of fact, albeit one of which only those familiar with both the UK and the USA may be aware.

But the author then gave the two bars of milk chocolate to the Times's food critic. He said that neither was better or worse, but that they were both differently bad.

The problem is that food criticism, by and large, is about subtlety, about complicated combinations of flavours and textures. But not all foods can be meaningfully measured in this way.

A wine, for example, can have many different dimensions. It can, and indeed, in my not-entirely-humble opinion, ought to, combine several tastes. They can arrive at one's consciousness at different times and with varying intensities. They can be fleeting hints or be longer-lasting. Wines are therefore a fit subject for the attention of a critic who focuses on complexity, subtlety, and nuance. Entire books have been written about the tastes of wines, some astonshingly thick and scholarly; and entire vocabularies have been invented to describe them, although most of these words do seem designed to be unintelligible.

Alas, real chocolate lies at the other end of the spectrum from wine. In its purest form, it has an immensely sweet and creamy taste, and a smooth and creamy texture. The sweeter it is (as long as the taste is not artificial) the better. The creamier it is (as long as it stays solid) the better. End of description. It is just not fitted to lengthy discussion. And so a chap whose livelihood is dependent upon discerning, separating out, labelling, and describing nuances will be entirely uninterested.

But this is not a bad thing, This who prefer single source, organic, high cocoa-solid content, dark chocolate have missed the point. If you want sublety in your food, don't eat chocolate. Eat almost anything else. And leave the chocolate for those who really enjoy it.