Death is Semisweet (6 page)

T
ry to pay attention and don’t ask too many questions until the end,” Stephanie said.

“About what we’re doing or about chocolate in general?” Heaven asked as she stirred some chocolate that was melting in the top of a double boiler set on a Bunsen burner-like affair.

“Didn’t you just ask me to give you a brief history of chocolate?” Stephanie snapped, like a third-grade schoolteacher reprimanding a child who wasn’t sitting still.

Heaven’s eyes widened. “Yes, Mrs. Simpson.”

“Okay, then. Don’t hold me to any of this exactly. I had no idea that people would want me to come to their schools and gourmet groups and talk about chocolate but they do. So I’ve had to study up, although I know what they really want are the free samples at the end of the talk.”

“Enough with the disclaimers. I’m not going to go over to Foster’s Chocolates and tell them Stephanie said
you put wax in your chocolates. This is just for me. So, I do have enough sense to know chocolate came from the New World, as they call us over here. Mexico?”

“That’s where the European adventurers found it. And who said anything about stupid old Foster’s? I don’t mention them in my speeches, just for spite. But back to Mexico. There’s a great reference to that in one of my chocolate books. It’s from a letter written by one of Cortez’s soldiers. He said the Aztec emperor Montezuma drank fifty cups of chocolate a day out of golden goblets, said it was an aphrodisiac.”

“Something I’ve never really understood,” Heaven admitted.

Stephanie looked over slyly. “Maybe you just haven’t had the right combination of chocolate and—”

Heaven cut in hurriedly. “Let’s keep on with the history lesson. Montezuma drank a lot of chocolate. The evil white guy plunderers from Europe took it back home with them. Then what?”

“I should mention that it probably originated in South America, just like the tomato. But they both got ‘discovered’ when they were cultivated in Mexico. The Indians of Mexico were obviously very evolved, cuisine-wise. Chocolate was used by both the Olmecs and the Mayans before the Aztecs. But the names ‘chocolate’ and ‘cocoa’ are both derived from Aztec. ‘Cocoa’ meant the tree it grew on and ‘chocolate’ meant bitter water. And it sure would be, bitter I mean, if you drank the stuff straight like Montezuma did.”

“I think my chocolate is melted,” Heaven said, looking down at her bowl.

“Throw in that piece of butter beside you and keep stirring,” Stephanie instructed. “So for the first hundred years or so, chocolate was just a drink in Europe, no
baked goods, no candy. They added stuff to it, ground nuts and sugar and cinnamon, to flavor the drink, but no one made candy with it until they learned how to process it better.”

“And when did that happen?” Heaven asked, wondering when she could steer the conversation to Foster’s again. She’d been shut down in her first attempt.

“Eighteen twenty-eight,” Stephanie said, proud of knowing the exact year.

Shit, we’ve got one hundred and seventy something years to go, Heaven thought. “What happened in 1828?”

“Cocoa beans are more than half cocoa butter, did you know that?” Stephanie was warming to her subject. “In 1828, a Dutch man named Conrad Van Houten invented a screw press that removed most of the butter from the bean. You ended up with cocoa powder and cocoa butter.”

“So that’s why we call it Dutch chocolate?”

“Not really,” Stephanie said dismissively. She wasn’t going to be hurried. “Then you added some of the cocoa butter back in to the cocoa powder, along with sugar, and it’s much smoother, it’s ‘eating’ chocolate. It became all the rage. Did you know that in World War Two, soldiers would sometimes get just three bars of chocolate to last them a whole day in battle?”

“Boy, a bunch of troops seriously jazzed up on chocolate. No wonder we won. I remember the time Iris, she couldn’t have been more than eight, ate three Hershey’s with almonds. She didn’t come down for days.”

“Now, do you want to know how cocoa beans get to be these blocks of chocolate we have here?” Stephanie asked sweetly. She was pouring melted milk chocolate into big metal Santa Claus molds.

“You bet I do,” Heaven said. This would at least lead to Foster’s eventually. It had to.

“Well, first the cocoa pods are harvested and broken apart and the pulp and the beans set out in the sun where they ferment. Things happen,” Stephanie said as she left the molded Santas to set up and deftly tossed some popcorn in a large copper bowl of dark melted chocolate. She threw in some toasted macadamia nuts that had been broken up.

“Things happen? That’s sounds like me trying to describe blimps to Hank. What happens?”

Stephanie gave Heaven a superior smile. “It gets hot and it kills the seeds’ embryos, for one thing. The cell walls are broken down and the astringent phenolic compounds bind together. So there.”

“I’m assuming this is all good news,” Heaven tried gallantly. She really did want to know about chocolate but at this rate it would be News Year’s Eve before she got out of here.

“Yes, it is. Now the beans are cleaned up and dried out and shipped to second-tier producers.”

“Up till now, it’s been first tier?”

“That’s right,” Stephanie said with a little surprise in her voice. Heaven was obviously interested and paying attention. “The second tier is the chocolate factory where—”

“Like Foster’s?” Heaven interrupted.

Stephanie shook her head. “No, no. Foster’s is a candymaker. That’s third tier. Now listen.”

“I know, and don’t interrupt you or you’ll start all over at the Aztecs,” Heaven said with a laugh. She could see there was no quick way to do this.

“The beans come into the chocolate factory. The chocolate factories are mostly in Switzerland, Belgium,
and England. Callebaut and Valrhona are two kinds I use,” Stephanie said, pointing to two big blocks of chocolate sitting on the counter, “and they’re two of the best and most expensive.”

You would.” Heaven too, always used the best ingredients she could afford and it didn’t surprise her that Stephanie did the same.

“So first, the beans are roasted, then a winnowing machine cracks open the seeds. There are these little morsels inside the shells and they are called nibs. Now this is where a chocolate factory gets its distinctive style.”

“From the nibs?” Heaven asked, deciding to just be a good student for a while and not try to lead the conversation.

“From blending nibs from all over the world and from different estates from the same country, just like a wine-maker would.”

“Who grows most of the cocoa?”

“It’s called cacao until it’s broken down to the seeds, then it’s cocoa.”

“Sorry,” Heaven said quickly. “Who grows most of the cacao?”

“West Africa and Brazil. Any place within twenty degrees north or south of the equator can grow cacao trees though. So the chocolate manufacturer blends their nibs, then the nibs are ground under heat. The stuff is then called chocolate liquor.”

“Is it alcoholic?”

“No, and don’t ask me why its called liquor, it just is,” Stephanie said as she went over to the sink and washed some chocolaty popcorn chunks off her hands. “The next step is a big one,” she said dramatically. Even she was getting a little impatient. “This is where they put the chocolate liquor under hydraulic pressure and extract
the cocoa butter. The other part that’s not cocoa butter is called cocoa solids. Drizzle that ganache on these, Jackson Pollack style.” She pushed a baking sheet of brownies Heaven’s way. They already had a sheen of milk chocolate frosting on top.

“I’ve got it, liquor becomes butter and solids,” Heaven recited as she drizzled her dark chocolate ganache over the tops of the brownies.

“But the chocolate would still have a gritty feel to it, if you tasted it at this stage. You have to refine it, which is where these big steel rollers grind the particles real small. Then it’s conched.”

Heaven knew if she didn’t bite, Stephanie would be disappointed. “Conch, like the sea animal they make fritters out of?”

“Rodolphe Lindt—Lindt still makes chocolate—invented this machine that was shaped like conch shells. It smoothes the chocolate in these troughs, back and forth, back and forth. I saw them when I went to Switzerland.”

“Oh, so you took part of your divorce settlement and went on a chocolate tour,” Heaven said teasingly.

“I had to know about this stuff, didn’t I? Now listen, we’re almost done. The conching also evaporates the acids and makes the chocolate smoother. And it’s done under heat. Everything’s done under heat. Now the chocolate has to be tempered. It has to be cooled down then heated back up again. Hot, cool, hot. That stabilizes the cocoa butter crystals that are left in the chocolate so they won’t turn the chocolate grainy again.”

“Whew, are we done yet?”

“Yes,” Stephanie said solemnly. “Then it’s put in these ten-pound blocks and away it goes, to candymakers. That’s an industry term for anyone who does the third
tier work, producing actual chocolate confections. Everyone from Godiva to me is a candymaker.”

Now, Heaven thought. Surely now. “And this is where Foster’s fits in to the picture?”

“Yes, even someone as big as Foster’s doesn’t do their own second-tier production. I think only Hershey’s in America does both, oh, and also someone around San Francisco, and maybe one someone else.”

“Steph, when you were growing up, did you ever talk about Foster’s, or was it a forbidden subject?”

Stephanie was scooping chocolate popcorn into clear bags, weighing them as she filled them. “You know, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t forbidden but we didn’t talk about it either. Sometimes when we’d be at a holiday celebration, Mom or Aunt Carol would say,‘I wonder what they’re doing over on the other side of the tracks,’ some crack like that. But it always made my grandmother uncomfortable and so we didn’t tease about the brothers if she was around. We didn’t eat Foster’s chocolates either.”

“I had one more question I was going to ask you on Sunday, before we were so rudely interrupted. How’s the company doing? Do you ever hear anything about it from your grandmother?”

“Why do you ask?” Stephanie replied with a definite chill in her voice.

“Oh, they asked me to be at this press conference on Friday and I just wondered what it was about. I know they’re going to talk about the New Year’s Eve thing but the person who called me last week, you know, some PR girl, said they had a big announcement to make. I just thought you might know.”

Stephanie started cleaning up her work area, wiping everything down with bleach water the same way Heaven
did at the restaurant. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know. The only person on the poor side of the family who has anything to do with Junior and Claude is my cousin Jane.”

“Is that Junior’s daughter or something?” Heaven asked, then remembered Stephanie had specified the poor side of the family. It couldn’t be Junior’s daughter.

“No, Junior has two daughters and Claude has a boy. None of them live in Kansas City or work for the company elsewhere. Jane is my Aunt Carol’s only child.”

Uh, oh. A traitor. “So Jane speaks to her uncles. How come?”

“It’s worse than that. Jane actually works for Foster’s. She’s in charge of the graphic design department. It really upset Mom and Aunt Carol. But Jane, we call her Janie, has always been a bit of a problem.”

“How a problem?” Heaven asked.

“When she was a kid, she was fat. Then she had bulimia or something. I remember Mom and Dad talking about it, Mom telling Dad how he was a doctor and he had to help. Janie got as thin as a rail when we were in high school.”

“And now? Oh, do you see her or is she banished because of her job?”

“Oh, no. My mother would never do that. I see her three or four times a year. Now she’s a health nut, with an emphasis on the ‘nut.’ She brings enough vitamins to a family dinner to choke a horse. And she has to take them in just the right order, some before, some after she eats.”

Heaven had lost interest in cousin Jane. She didn’t think she’d learned much for Bonnie Weber. “At least she doesn’t sneak in your bathroom and puke. Now can we talk about my masterpiece?”

“What do you want to make?”

Heaven shrugged. “I want it to have at least three different treatments of chocolate, but I don’t know if it’s a cake or ice cream or what. I want something about it to be surrealistic, like art.”

“Well, the body part thing has been done. Even here on the Plaza I sell chocolate legs and breasts. I can’t do a chocolate penis or I’d lose my lease. So you don’t want to do body parts.”

“What about animals?” Heaven asked.

“No, too easy. Think chocolate Easter rabbit. I’ll think about it overnight but I do know one thing it has to have,” Stephanie said.

“What’s that?”

“You’re a chef. Whatever it is, it has to have a big chocolate cleaver sticking out of it.”

J
oe Long and Heaven Lee walked into the Woodside Racquet Club. An easel in the lobby told them the semifinals of the women’s body building contest was across the street in the gym. Woodside was a health club, swimming pool and tennis court complex just to the west of the Plaza. Heaven and Joe headed across the street, walking fast to keep out of the cold. The sunny, forty-degree days turned into nippy, twenty-degree nights as soon as the sun went down.

“I smell snow,” Joe said happily.

“Me too,” Heaven agreed. “I can hardly wait. We haven’t had a good snow yet. There was that little, half-ass snow shower around Thanksgiving.”

The gym was steamy with bodies and the air smelled of sweat socks, expensive aftershave and disinfectant. Even upper-middle-class bodies perspired. The aerobics classes at peak times were held in the gym, along with
step, yoga and Tae Bo. There were also men’s and women’s basketball teams sponsored by the club. But tonight, the bleachers had been pulled down and a stage had been erected under one basketball hoop. It had the energy of a small-town beauty contest or talent show. Heaven and Joe looked around.

“I wonder if it’s like a wedding,” Joe murmured. “I’d hate to sit on the wrong side.”

The crowd seemed to be equally divided on the two sides of the gym, sitting about halfway up on each side. “Where’s your friend?” Heaven asked.