When All Else Fails

“Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. It is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.”—Baron Justus von Liebig

Rosemary mint. Wasabi and ginger. Coffee. Curry. Pomegranate. Blueberry. Cacao nibs. Orange. Pear. Lavender and cloves. Chili and cinnamon spice.

These are just some of the flavors of chocolate we’ve been discovering and tasting lately. Some come in bars with names like Xocolatl, Black Pearl, Fire, Refresh, Sexy, and Pleasure. Others are more literal; Earl Grey, Citrus and Chili, Salt and Pepper. Most of these can be found at one of our favorite chocolate shops—Biagio. The place is like a jewelry store for chocolate bars; it’s impossible to walk out of there in a bad mood. Just below street level, the store is easy to pass if you don’t know better. But once you do know, you won’t be able to help yourself. Every chocolate lover in the neighborhood frequents this place.

It’s a cold and dark winter Tuesday evening. A man in cycling gear stands by a shelf and quickly chooses several chocolates. Another customer studies the two different chocolate bars in her hands, then sets one back on the shelf.

“I’ll get that one next week,” she says.

The door jingles and a young woman wearing a brown knitted scarf enters. She walks straight to the counter.

“I’m trying to remember which chocolate my boyfriend likes best,” she says to the clerk. “His name is Scott.”

The clerk, a woman with curly white-gray hair and a strong New York accent, seems to know who Scott is; at least she takes the younger woman over to a shelf and points out different bars. One of her suggestions is a chocolate bar flavored with sea salt. This may sound strange, but it’s pretty fantastic. Think sweet and salty combinations. There’s also salt and cracked pepper. Last week we came across a peppercorn-flavored bar, though we opted for another with rose and ginger instead. It tastes like rose petals and reminds me of the perfume my Ukrainian relatives would bring as gifts. Strangely enough, the combination of spice and flower is quite good.

Soon I’m the only customer left. Of late, I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect chili-and-cinnamon-spice chocolate bar (ancient civilizations in Mesoamerica—the Olmec are thought to be the first—made the first chocolate and flavored it with chili spices; the Aztec called their rich chocolate drink xocoatl, which Hernando Cortez brought to Spain and sweetened with sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves), so I ask the clerk what she recommends. She approves of my choice of Christopher Elbow’s Dark Spice bar. When I also ask about a raw 100 percent cacao bar, she suggests I try the store’s best seller: Pralus of France’s 100 percent cacao bar . She breaks off a piece for me. I’ve never tried chocolate made from 100 percent cacao before; the closest was a 99 percenter R. and I found the other month. We enjoyed it, but the bar was sort of powdery and took some time in your mouth before its flavor and texture could be appreciated. The Pralus bar, though, was creamy with subtle fruit and flower flavors. Let’s just say we’ve since purchased several of them.

The most interesting thing about trying different chocolates has been discovering how much flavor pure chocolate contains. Chocolate from different countries and continents tastes of a variety of flowers, fruits, and spices—it all depends on the soil in which it is grown. Because of these nuances in taste, savoring a quality piece of chocolate is similar to sipping a fine wine. And having synesthesia adds color to the subtle differences; for instance, I see a lot of soft reds and pinks with the Madagascar chocolate bars we’ve been trying. The Pralus bar has a kind of bluish gray in it. The rose one actually evokes a lavender hue.

I have to mention one more chocolate lover’s stop in the nation’s capital: AC/KC. The best thing about this place is that you can order rich hot chocolate in different flavors named after “The Divas.” I keep ordering the Lucy—a cinnamon-and-chili-spice concoction that takes its name from the fiery redhead of comedy. There are also the Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, and Eartha Kitt. R. ordered the lavender-infused Liz Taylor last time. We’ve also tried the Ginger Rogers, which contains dried ginger and wasabi.

The next chocolate bar I plan to try is salted caramel. Or maybe another spice-flavored bar. Or maybe a rich xocoatl drink. There are worse addictions.

—C.

Marilynne Robinson's Home

The snow is still here, dirty and piled on the sides of the road. Lawn chairs and ironing boards stake out parking spaces. Neighborly shoveling and snowbound parties have turned into shouting matches and threats. Driving to work is an obstacle course of potholes and lanes that end in snow mounds. The one good thing about the longer commute is that I have more time to listen to a recording of Marilynne Robinson’s Home.

My feelings on Robinson’s third novel are mixed. (I should note that I have not read Gilead, to which Home is a companion.) When I first started listening to Home, I worried that not enough was happening in the present action to keep my attention, especially because I was listening to it rather than reading it. However, the Virginia Woolf–like meditations on place and people soon drew me in, and the novel took shape as an intense interaction between a brother and sister who haven’t seen each other in twenty years. The relationships among the characters, who include an ailing father, give momentum to the book's thoughtful and deliberative telling. And while the tension and emotional awkwardness sometimes make the story painful to listen to, they demonstrate Robinson’s skill in storytelling.

Now that I am closer to the end of the book, though, I am feeling a little tired, not of the characters’ pain so much as the many scenes of the father’s sermon-like opining on his son’s twenty-year abandonment. Perhaps part of my irritation is that the reader of the recording attempts to imitate an elderly man’s voice that is extremely grating and strained. The father, the Rev. Boughton, has too much to say to always be heard in such a voice. We’ve also heard his emotionally painful introspection several times. These lectures finally build to a crucial scene that explains more and pushes the story past the bounds in which it has so far remained. The scene is a relief for the reader—before this moment, so much is still unsaid and unexplained.

Home’s brilliance is Robinson’s portrayal of the characters. They are complicated in their sins and good intentions, and while I don’t always like them, I do care what happens to them. In both Housekeeping (her first novel) and Home, Robinson reveals her characters layer by layer so that by the end of each book, the reader realizes that one of the main characters is much further from mental stability than it at first seems. The recognition is kind of horrifying. In the case of Home, we get Jack, a well-read, clever, and intelligent middle-aged man who has struggled with alcoholism and keeping a job. We know he has stayed away from his family for two decades, but the true fragility of his mental state does not emerge until later in the novel. More and more he seems to be living in a reality suited to an angst-riddled teenager. Both novels turn out to be portraying characters for whom homelessness is home; Robinson depicts an almost imperceptible line between stability and instability, between having a home and surviving as a drifter. For Jack, alcoholism is merely a symptom of a seemingly innate sadness and loneliness his father says he has displayed from birth. It is also connected to past events, but the novel seems to be saying that Jack’s lack of place, his separateness, his rejection of his family’s help and love, is inevitable.

I am nearing the end of Home and waiting to see how this sense of inevitability plays out. It’s been a few years since I read Housekeeping, but I remember feeling as if it contained a kind of magical realism. By the end of that story, the realization of homelessness seems almost surreal, and I wondered if I’d read the book completely wrong. Home feels more grounded and because of this, is more emotionally affecting.

—C.