Christmas Cocoa

Cradling a steaming mug in my hands and stifling a yawn, I surveyed the pile of presents underneath the tree. “Mom,” I asked with concern, “you put in two packets instead of one, right?” She had indeed — the cup I was clutching enclosed the contents of two whole packets of Swiss Miss powder, some hot water, and a candy cane for stirring. As steam rose from the mug the candy cane began to sweat, the red and white stripes melding into a sticky pink. It was 6:30 in the morning on Christmas Day, and I was twelve years old. Whenever I wasn’t tearing into a present (we opened them youngest to oldest, one by one), I held the candy cane between my fingers and gently swirled the cocoa around it, causing the cane to dissolve into a peppermint icicle with a deathly sharp tip.

I loved “candy cane cocoa,” perhaps even more than I loved the cocoa that came in the can and was dotted with little crunchy marshmallows, and since it was something that we only had on Christmas, it seemed even more special. I particularly enjoyed the sludge that remained on the bottom of the cup if I didn’t stir too vigorously (the reason I requested two packets of cocoa was to ensure a good thick layer of the stuff). When all of the liquid was gone, I spooned up the dense, brown paste and savored its sticky sweetness. At the time, I considered it to be the essence of chocolate.

Besides the inevitable Swiss Miss in a variety of flavors, my parents also stocked Baker’s chocolate for general baking (yes, I tried to eat it plain; no, I didn’t enjoy it) and Nestle morsels for the more specific purpose of making Toll House Cookies. Throughout my youth I also sampled a variety of candy bars: Mars Bars, Milky Ways, Snickers, and the like. It wasn’t until I was much older that I had a piece of real chocolate — unadulterated by nuts and nougat, sweet and bitter in tandem, complex.

I was nineteen and working at a gourmet grocery store when I first tasted more upscale chocolate. One afternoon I was lucky enough to be tasked with mutilating a giant-sized bar of bittersweet Callebaut into saleable chunks, which I did with a long two-handled blade, although I might have been better served by a wedge and a sledgehammer. While I didn’t manage to create neat, geometric blocks of chocolate, I did end up with a pile of pieces that would have looked at home in a Picasso exhibit as well as a rather sizeable mound of chocolate shavings, which in my estimation was almost as good.

I piled the leftover shards on a piece of plastic wrap which I carried with me for the rest of the day, letting the pieces of melting chocolate on my tongue distract me from the boredom of my non-chocolate-related tasks, but I didn’t pay much attention to the interplay of flavors or the mouthfeel — it was chocolate, and therefore it was good. I would like to say that at that moment my desire for candy bars and Swiss Miss disappeared completely, but it would not be true. The unfolding of my interest in chocolate did not happen in one magical moment; I didn’t “discover” the joys of high-end chocolate and immediately relegate all of the cheaper stuff to chocolata non grata status.

At 6:30 in the morning this past Christmas I sat on my mom’s couch rolling a steaming mug of cocoa between my palms, and predictably surveying the pile of presents underneath the tree. To display their love of tradition, my twenty-year-old sister and sixteen-year-old brother still insist that we get a very early start on the day, and we continue to open the presents in order, youngest to oldest, one at a time. But now the mug in my hands contains cocoa from Lake Champlain Chocolates (our local chocolatier), hot organic milk and cream from a nearby farm, and a candy cane that soon, with some gentle swirling, will become a sticky peppermint icicle with a razor sharp point.