Dark Victory

When my father was a child, he suffered from various ill-defined illnesses that often kept him tucked away in his warm bed while his fellow classmates recited their Latin. You see, my grandfather Jacob was the school’s principal and he demanded that his son, my father, be the exemplar of high moral character as well as academic excellence. No wonder my father took the only available escape route: his sick bed. During these bouts of infirmity, he refused all food and drink except chocolate-coated gingerbread hearts that his mother would feed him, one by one.

Chocolate – dark, milk or white, and with or without nuts, fruits and spirits – is like mother’s milk to many Europeans. Whenever family or friends came to our house, they never came empty-handed and most often they brought chocolate. Sometimes the chocolate arrived in bricks, so big and thick and hard (especially after a stay in the fridge) that the chunks had to be literally chiselled off with a mallet. I always preferred the double-decker boxed sets. You peeled off the divider and beheld another whole dark universe where you could have “do-overs” of your favourites – in my case, the marzipan and the maraschino cherry in kirsch.

Every Friday was Men’s Card Night. About once a month, my father played host to an evening that involved gin rummy, coffee, coffee cake, chocolates, cigarettes and a glass of schnapps. Mr. Liberman was a regular on the card-playing circuit. He was also a chocolatier of the old school who specialized in dark chocolate, as well as roasted cashews and almonds. During my childhood, his tiny shop was the place to go; when you entered, the aroma of sugar and cocoa filled the air. A little chime would sound, and Mr. Liberman would come out from the back. Wearing a white smock, he would pick up your selections with tongs and gently place them on a bed of wax paper in a plain white box with a gold sticker on it: Liberman’s Chocolate. Like my father, I preferred the sweeter and milder taste of milk chocolate, but I did feel very grown up whenever I could force down the dark rectangles filled with walnuts, rum or whiskey. My brother and I would tag along with our father on his visits to Mr. Liberman’s shop, and occasionally we would be allowed to visit the back of the store. All the chocolate was made here on large, hulking pieces of iron and steel. And all the machinery was covered in chocolate!

Mr. Liberman was, of course, our main supplier by a long shot. Almost every week, he delivered boxes and bags filled with slightly flawed creations that couldn’t be sold: chocolate daisies with missing petals, bunnies with broken ears, lopsided lollypops…. Even though I never really liked chocolate – I preferred something lighter, sweeter and prettier like petits fours in pastel hues or strawberry tarts – being a compulsive personality, I still chomped on ounce after ounce until my temples throbbed. My father, too, was susceptible to chocolate and suffered from migraine headaches for years until my mother finally forbade Mr. Liberman from bringing another morsel of the stuff into the house. Eventually, my father’s debilitating headaches subsided and the dancing spots in front of my eyes faded away.

So, what to make of the raft of spas offering “choco-therapy”? The argument for cocoa as an anti-aging ingredient stems from its concentration of antioxidants (apparently over 25,200 in a single spoonful of raw chocolate powder) that help reduce the amount of free radicals in the body. Cocoa also contains considerable amounts of caffeine, which acts as a stimulant to the central nervous system and increases both mental alertness and general metabolic activity. At the Chocolate Spa at the Hotel Hershey in Pennsylvania, you can enjoy such treatments as the Whipped Cocoa Bath (15 minutes in a foaming chocolate-milk bath) and the Chocolate Bean Polish, where your skin is rubbed with cocoa-bean husks and walnut shells. The Chocolate Fondue Wrap sees you coated in mud and essence of cocoa and then wrapped in a cocoon for an hour. At Elizabeth Milan Premier Day Spa in Toronto, they follow up their Chocolate Fondue Body Wrap with a steaming cup of Mexican hot chocolate. If that doesn’t get your heart going, you can mosey on up the street to the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, where they can fit you with a new one!

Chocolate may indeed be a beauty or health wonder ingredient, but it seems that it’s primary virtue is sybaritic – unless, like me, you’re ill-equipped to enjoy it much. In that case, this Valentine’s, may I suggest chocolate in another form: diamonds. Cognac-brown diamonds are undeservedly underappreciated. They’re not food, true, but they’re definitely poetic.