One shouldn’t spend too much mental energy hating Valentine’s day. There are far more important things to call an end to: cool white light bulbs, SAA and slashed jeans all spring to mind.
One shouldn’t spend too much mental energy hating Valentine’s day. There are far more important things to call an end to: cool white light bulbs, SAA and slashed jeans all spring to mind. But one thing that does irk me about this tradition is the greater than usual presence of truffles.
I don’t mean the musky fungus that hounds unearth so you can shave it over pasta, but chocolate truffles. It seems curmudgeonly to hate these seemingly innocent little bites, but it’s the impostors I loathe: they now go by the same name, and which I’m pretty sure should answer only to the name confectionery.
There was a time when a truffle meant a rough sphere made from variations on ganache or chocolate buttercream, rolled in cocoa or a thin layer of more chocolate. These original nuggets got their name from the underground fungus because they looked like them. They were plainish, dark, dense and awfully chocolatey. Richer than pure chocolate rather than sweeter. Sometimes whisky, rum, nut praline or other flavouring and textural elements were added, but these were background players.
Then things started to change. Truffles became less about chocolate and more about novelty and looks. I get it, sort of. There’s something awesome about technical virtuosity: sweet things that look like miniature planets, gold bars or an acid-trip and which boast the sheen of marble or the shape of a ziggurat are undeniably fun.
But the fun stops when you take the first bite and hit the sickly sweet fruity syrup, toffeelike gloop or whipped nougat within. Gruesome. I’m guessing it’s this sort of confection that prompted Forrest Gump’s dear mum to make that bludgeonedto-death comment about life being like a box of chocolates because “you never know what you’re going to get”.
Why so much effort to make something that’s awfully unchocolatey? Can’t they look like the Death Star but still be mostly about chocolate? It seems to be an unstoppable trend. There are, I’ll admit, some really great, deep, dark, intense specimens out there, which elevate the cocoa bean to great heights and deserve the name, but they are fewer every day.
And yes, I know that things get watered down, tweaked, contorted; I accept that for some a burst of cherry cheesecake creme fondant is exactly what’s expected when biting into something called a truffle. But that word makes me think chocolate. A chocolate hit that has me reeling with its intensity. When the other ingredients vastly outshine the cocoa bean, we need to find another, less misleading name for these delicacies. There are quite enough nasty surprises on Valentine’s day as it is.