Notes from the brighter side
Iwrite this having had a most disturbing thought. What if – aside from the loo roll, flour and pasta – the supply chain for chocolate had been disrupted during lockdown? That would have been such a disaster, I am struggling even to imagine it. The very concept of spending lockdown chocolateless is panic-inducing. To calm myself, I think I’m going to need – oh yes – a piece of chocolate.
Thinking about it now, I realise that at my house we treated buying chocolate as equally important to planning for dinners, allocating for fruit and tallying loo roll supplies. Be it for cooking, snacking or medicinal purposes, chocolate was frequently on the list for our supermarket shops. In much the same way that people in lockdown sought to make the most of leftovers – cauliflower leaves can be made into good soup AND good crisps, by the way – we also sought to make the most of our chocolate. Only yesterday, my sister was melting some old Easter eggs we didn’t know we had to make this kind of super-posh brownie (the recipe stipulated extra-virgin olive oil). It was rather delicious in the end, albeit quite burnt. Other innovations have included chocolate porridge, chocolate shortcrust pastry, vegan chocolate mousse and my sister’s patented “chocolate and oat and seed and nut and berry and honey and peanut butter and granola cookies”. That last one was the product of a particularly rainy day.
I do think that chocolate is a miraculous foodstuff. If anything, it’s crucial in summer because it tastes so good with fruit, which is always abundant at this time of year. Strawberries and chocolate separately are delicious, but put them together and they are weepinducingly good. White chocolate marries brilliantly with acidic passion fruit, lemon and cranberry; milk chocolate with milder peaches, oranges and coconuts; dark chocolate sets off the biting tang of lime, raspberries and cherries perfectly.
In fact, so vital is chocolate to wellbeing, that throughout popular culture it is an actual remedy. In Harry Potter and The Prisoner Of Azkaban it restores Dementor victims; in Bridget Jones’s Diary it is crucial to healing heartbreak; in Down With Love it is a substitute for men; both Joanne Harris and Roald Dahl wrote entire books about it. I’ve heard the Gainsborough Hotel & Spa, here in Bath, has a tap that dispenses liquid chocolate! Clearly chocolate should be donated to key workers, to boost morale and because chocolate says thank you better than anything. And, as long as it has at least 70 per cent cocoa solids, it is basically a superfood. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.