“Okay now,” said Frédéric after about fifteen minutes, after I had wandered around smelling the delicious herbs, lined up on rows along the back of the greenhouse. Then he said something I didn’t understand and motioned me to copy him as he, ferociously quick, started cracking the tiny beans with a hammer and unleashing their warm chocolaty insides. Every fourth one, he threw away.
“I thought you made chocolate,” he said, puzzled as I stared at him in disbelief.
“A machine made chocolate,” I said. “I kind of switched it on and off.”
He made a very Gallic pouting face at me. Benoît barely glanced up before continuing on with his hammer. This seemed extraordinary, like we were making chocolate in the Middle Ages.
“Handmade is how we do things,” Frédéric said patiently. He’d lost his flirtatious edge, I noticed. Perhaps he only liked girls who knew how to hand-make chocolate. That must cut his prospective pool down quite substantially.
Frédéric nodded toward a spare hammer. I took it and tentatively hit a bean. Nothing. I hit it harder. Splat. It went flat on the ground. Benoît wordlessly took it and threw it in the bin. I gulped. I wasn’t entirely sure how much help I was going to be here.
“Perhaps you just watch for now,” said Frédéric. And I did and noticed a quick little flick of the wrists they made as they assaulted the beans. It was a bit like a very, very good game of Whack-a-Mole.
Then Frédéric took out a surprisingly dainty minivac and blew away all the husks. I finished up my scalding little coffee, which tasted less like coffee and more like a very strong cleaning solution. There was absolutely no way I could drink the filthy stuff. I would never get used to it.
“Now, we feed the beans,” he said, indicating a large industrial grinder.
“So you do use a machine,” I said, as if I’d scored a point. I got a look.
Benoît came back in, lugging in huge crates of milk, butter, and cream from outside. It was all in rough, reused glass. I hadn’t seen milk delivered in a glass bottle for a long time. Benoît was calling a farewell to someone out of the back door. It still wasn’t light, but the sky wasn’t as pitch-black as it had been.
“We use only one dairy,” said Frédéric. “The Oise. It delivers every morning. Swiss would be better, alas, but time is of the urgency to us.”
He started up the grinding machine. The noise was incredible. Then, little by little, he fed in the precious beans, gently and carefully. Gradually, at the bottom, a thick, dark liquid started to gather, strained through a net in the collection bottle. Frédéric stared at it happily. When it finally stopped, I straightened up carefully.
“Now what?” I said.
We just started with the liquid and hurled stuff at it at Braders, but I didn’t want to admit that.
“You conch,” said Frédéric.
The word was the same in English. To conch was to mix up the different ingredients, the levels, to make the chocolate dark, light, milk, flavored. A tiny mistake one way or the other would make it disgusting, too sweet, grainy, or crystalline. Our machines were calibrated to make everything the same every time; they used cheap milk powder and life prolongers and additives.
“Of course, that is for Thierry,” said Frédéric, lowering his head. “It is the most important, the most sacred part.”
To conch by hand was very difficult. And then it would need refining and tempering so it held together. I raised an eyebrow.
“This is for tomorrow,” explained Frédéric, and indeed, Benoît had now moved on to pouring a thick gooey mass from a pot and working it back and forth with a spatula while he stirred another pot on the stove gently. Normally people would use a thermometer for this, but Benoît had been practically raised in the shop, I learned later. He knew it as instinctively as a top musician knows when his instrument is out of tune. If he was happy, he would hum tunelessly. If he was not, he would dump everything back in the huge pot and start all over again until it was perfect.
Finally, he was ready.
“Rien plus,” shouted Frédéric, only just audible above the din of the grinder. “No more. Nothing but the finest of dark beans from Costa Rica, the finest of fresh cream milk from the best fed cows this side of Normandy, the finest cane sugar from Jamaica, all churned to perfection in the traditional way, not by huge machines full of fat and preservative and old bits of truc and the Band-Aids of the paisants, non?”
The colors blending together and being poured into molds looked absolutely beautiful; in fact, looking at them, you’d be hard pressed to disagree with Thierry’s philosophy, that chocolate was something meant to be made fresh and consumed fresh, no less than coffee or a croissant. And the smell was warmer, richer, purer than anything back in the UK, where we’d used a hefty dose of vegetable fats to bolster up the mix (which was why so many people who loved British chocolate found the posh stuff so hard to take to—it was the comforting fats they really liked).
“Do not dip the fingers,” ordered Frédéric, but I would never, ever touch food being prepared; I’d had enough tedious health and safety courses to have gotten that one through my head. I wasn’t an idiot. Frédéric was, however, passing me up a long ladle, which looked to be one solid piece of curved metal with a tiny tasting spoon at the end. Benoît stood out of my way.
“Attention,” he warned. “Be careful.”
Frédéric shook his head but declined to say any more, simply watching my face curiously and intently. He was staring very closely at my lips. I found it oddly off-putting, but in a nice way. I carefully let down the ladle and scooped up a mouthful of the pale brown liquid.
Blowing on it to let it cool, Frédéric staring at me all the while, I raised it to my lips.
Heroin addicts often say that all they are ever doing is chasing that first hit, the first time they felt wrapped in cotton wool, all the worries of the world behind them. I wouldn’t say I was quite as dramatic as that. Nonetheless, the moment the still-warm, gently thickening substance hit my tongue, I really did think, for an instant, that I was going to fall onto the table—no, worse, that I was going to DIVE in, to shovel every morsel of that sweet (but not too sweet), creamy, (but not sickly), dense, deeply flavored, rich, smooth, all-enveloping, chocolatey goodness. It felt like someone giving you a warm hug. As soon as I had swallowed it, I wanted the taste back in my mouth again, wanted to cram myself full of it. I found myself embarrassed suddenly, blushing, as I noticed Frédéric’s eyes still on my lips, intently watching me. My hand went automatically to dip the spoon again, then at the last minute, I realized this would look desperate, unprofessional, greedy, hungry, or risky. Instead, I lifted it out, empty. Frédéric raised an eyebrow.