Holiday Tour Day 23: Time Travel Kitchen and Charles
A gem among chocolates?
I know, I know, you can’t wait to the good part on this one. Ruby chocolate!?
I went to bed at 1am and woke up at 6:30am intending to finish baking this feature so I could take it out of the oven and serve it to you all… but then my body decided to sleep some more. It has been a long haul. So here it is, a little later than intended, but as with all good things…
Years ago, when I was living in Italy, I was invited to my then-boyfriend’s (very Italian) family for a lunch. You know, of course, that a lunch in Italy is not the same as a lunch here in America. It lasts 5 hours and you eat enough for a week.
I remember standing in a small corridor that separated the kitchen from the sitting room. To my left, all the women were in the kitchen rolling pasta dough (because of course they make it from scratch). To my right, the men sat on the couch watching football. (That’s European football, known to us here as soccer.)
I was incensed. Oh! I thought, my arms indignantly crossed, isn’t that just SO infuriatingly sexist! The women in the kitchen doing all the work and the men enjoying their football match!
Then I listened. The kitchen was loud and boisterous, peals of laughter peaking among a constant flow of chatter. The sitting room was silent, with just the low drone of the game on the TV.
And I looked. The women were having an absolute blast. Their faces radiant, they laughed and talked and blew little clouds of flour into the air as they patted the dough. The men seemed despondent, their shoulders slumped. Not one said a word. They seemed… actually uninterested in the game. At one point one of them looked over toward the kitchen, wistful almost.
The next second I was in the kitchen with the women. I knew a party when I saw one, and wasn’t about to miss it.
Always, always choose kitchens over sitting rooms. And pasta over football.
TCM Holiday Tour Day 23 pairing:
TIME TRAVEL KITCHEN and CHARLES
Jolene had me at “time travel.” The “kitchen” part was the confirmation, the icing on the cake, the inclusion in the chocolate. I’m obsessed with the human experience of time, and as a sworn foodie, the very idea of a time traveling kitchen captivates me. And as you’ve just seen, traveling to a kitchen should take just a few steps down a little corridor.
Jolene and I have had a lot of fun preparing this feature for you. It has taken a few different turns—in fact Jolene has a fun surprise waiting for you next year—but we’re ready, we’ve cleaned up the counter, and we’re all dressed up and ready to celebrate!
Please welcome
and .
The Cacao Muse: Lovely plate of chocolate, Jolene! Tell us about you and your work.
Jolene Handy: I’m a New Yorker now living in Chicago who takes readers on trips to other times and places to explore the food and culture of those times. My Substack is called Time Travel Kitchen.
TCM: Any special chocolate memories you’d like to share?
Jolene: The very first experience of chocolate I remember was with my Grandmother. She would take me to Radio City Music Hall a lot to see movies and the Rockettes. We would always stop at the concession in the gorgeous Art Deco lobby and buy Raisinets.
To this day, it’s the only candy I eat at the movies. I think those chocolate covered raisins are delicious and they carry a boatload of sweet memories about my grandmother and New York City in the late 1950’s.
Jolene: Also, just look at the lobby at Radio City in this photo from the 1950’s. You can actually see a bit of the candy concession at the bottom left corner. No wonder I remember Raisinets even though I was just four years old—what kid could forget this?
Birgitte: Well, as they say, you’ve come a long way, baby! This ain’t your grandmother’s chocolate, that’s for sure. Neither is the one I’ve selected for you.
TCM: Before we get to the tasting, we’d love to hear more about growing up with chocolate… how your cacao palate has evolved.
Jolene: The older I’ve gotten, the more I enjoy dark chocolate. It’s not that I don’t like milk chocolate, but if given the choice I will always take dark. It was the opposite when I was younger. Has the chocolate changed or have I? Also, I never enjoyed white chocolate, why is it even called ‘chocolate’?
Birgitte: To your first question, I would say both! The chocolate has definitely, absolutely changed—the mere proliferation of craft chocolate companies here in the US in the past two decades is indicative of a growing movement of fine, artisan chocolate. As for us growing older, our palates evolve and our tastes change, shaped by our families, friends, colleagues, and even total strangers. We acquire new tastes (hello wine, coffee, cocktails!) and start to think more about our health (goodbye, sugar, palm oil, preservatives!). All of that reshapes our relationship with chocolate. Milk chocolate has less cocoa and more sugar and dairy, whereas dark chocolate of course… has no milk and little sugar.
As for white chocolate, assuming it’s made with real cacao butter, it is real chocolate. Meg Oolders had the same question… you can take a peek at her feature to see.
[Off screen, a pained meow. Yep, you guessed it. Our friend Boss Cat]
Boss Cat [gesturing dramatically with his paw]: It was a very hard, a very hard, you know? All the time I think, white chocolate no is real cioccolato! Non è vero cioccolato! But, it is. <sniff>
[Another meow, emanating from somewhere in the living room. To be clear, there’s no football match on Jolene’s TV. We do hear sounds of Christmas classics playing in the background.]
Birgitte: Well well well! Who do we have here sniffing around the Christmas Tree?
Jolene: Oh that’s my cat Tillie!
Birgitte: She seems fascinated by the lights and the decorations. Better those than chocolate, for sure! Speaking of chocolate… Jolene, we have a very special chocolate for you. It’s one we have not yet seen on this Tour, and I wanted you to be paired with it, because Time Travel Kitchen is such a gem in the Substackverse.
Tillie [overhearing]: Ruby? What is ruby? It sparkles?
Birgitte: Haha it doesn’t sparkle but it does have an interesting history. In a cacao bean shell, the Belgian chocolate manufacturer Barry Callebaut (the same one that supplies some of Tony’s Chocolonely chocolate) introduced ruby chocolate at a launch event in Shanghai in 2017, to great fanfare. They claimed they had found a unique type of cacao that yielded this extraordinary ruby color when made into chocolate.
But notice the ingredients here in this bar. They’re not much different from white chocolate… except for citric acid.
Jolene: Hmm why would you need citric acid in chocolate?
Birgitte: Exactly. In 2009, Barry Callebaut registered a patent at the European Patent Office for an invention relating to “acidified cocoa nibs” and a “process for producing cocoa-derived material [that includes] treating cocoa nibs obtained from beans or seeds which have a higher polyphenol content than fermented cocoa beans with an acid.” Why would a chocolate company need to take out a patent on something that they allegedly found in nature? I mean this isn’t Monsanto, after all.
Anyhow, various industry experts and journalists did some sleuthing and reached the opinion that Callebaut’s ruby chocolate was made not from some special pink cacao but through interfering with the usual fermentation process. They believe that Callebaut prematurely stops the fermentation and drying stage and treats the not fully fermented cacao beans with citric acid. This would explain the sour, tangy notes in the bar—because the fermentation has not fully run its course and the flavors have not matured. And it explains the color—because some cacao beans, the ones used here and grown typically in South America and West Africa, naturally have more of a red-pinkish color than others. But you still need to interfere with the fermentation process in specific ways to emphasize that color and really bring it out. Hence the need for a patent.
The bar I’ve selected for you is the Raspberry & Pistachio Bar by Charles Chocolates, an artisan chocolate maker based in San Francisco.
Let’s take a closer look—and a taste!
Chocolate: Raspberry & Pistachio Bar
Percentage: Unlisted
Origin: Unlisted
Ingredients: Ruby cacao beans (sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk powder, unsweetened chocolate, citric acid, soy lecithin), pistachios, freeze-dried raspberries
Price: $7.95
Tasting Notes: This chocolate is undeniably, fragrantly sweet. It’s the first thing that hits your palate. But it is a sweetness born of flowers and fruits, and quickly you sense a wave of tangy, almost sour notes, punctuated by the chewy bits of raspberry and the nutty crunch of pistachio pieces embedded in the bar.
TCM: Before we leave, is there anything you’d change about the chocolate industry if you could?
Jolene: This tour has been a real eye-opener for me in terms of hearing different experts (and you) shining a light on being more informed when purchasing chocolate—the sources and conditions under which it was made. I found myself googling my own choices. Thanks for doing this.
Birgitte: Our pleasure Jolene, and thank you for joining us on the Tour!
We hope you’ve enjoyed our time with Jolene in her kitchen—please share, like, comment, and we’ll see you again tomorrow on our next stop.
COMING UP! DAY 24 of the TCM HOLIDAY TOUR
We’ve only got two days left of the Tour! What a ride it has been!
So, who’s next?
You didn’t think we were going to go for twenty-five days straight without talking to an ACTUAL CHOCOLATE MAKER did you?
~ Um yeah actually I did, because here we are Day 23 and still no chocolate peeps. I mean, writers are cool ‘n all but I wanna read about a real chocolate maker.
~ Tomorrow your wish comes true.
~ Thanks. Geez. You really know how to drag it out. Make us read twenty-three posts before we get to the good stuff. Worse than those scratch-your-eyes out marketing videos with no fast-forward button!
~ You saying all these amazing writers we’ve met are less than?
~ No that’s not what I meant. I mean… I meant… Oh f— great. Foot fully in mouth. They won’t read this will they?
~ …
Thank you so much for including me, Birgitte, and I love the idea of the Ruby Chocolate and will order some. In fact, my birthday is July and rubies are my birthstone! ❤️