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.

Synesthesia, Fantasia, Josh Ritter, and Your Favorite Sounds

The book I want to write about is somewhere in a box. Not much else needs to be said about the state of things the last week and a half. I’ll have to discuss that particular story collection another day. Instead, I thought I’d muse on something else that’s been on my mind: sound. The shape and color of sound, the way we write about sound, the way sound infuses you at a concert, and my list of people’s favorite sounds. Also, many of us in the nation’s capital are extremely sad that Tai Shan, the youngest of our pandas, will be leaving. His parents are on loan from China as part of a breeding and conservation effort, but Tai Shan was Born in the USA. His parents are scheduled to return to China next year.

When I talk about the shape and color of sound, I am being literal. As a synesthete, I “see” sounds. I don’t actually see colors that aren’t there, but with every sound, I automatically picture a shape and often a color. I think about this a lot when I’m writing; it enhances my descriptions, though once in a while, someone comments that describing a character’s voice as orange, for instance, is nonsense. However, many other artists and writers are also synesthestes—we experience synesthesia, in which one sense is crossed with another. Synesthesia has many forms, but in my case, I see color with every sense (it seems my visual cortex never shuts off). Taste, touch, sound, letters, numbers, words, ideas, concepts, months, weeks, groups of people or things, pain, pleasure—all of these have color. It helps me organize and remember. It also helps me identify what I’m hearing or what I’m feeling—what instruments are used in a song or what kind of pain is hurting my stomach, for example.

In writing, sound often gets neglected. Luckily, being able to see sounds helps me to think about its textures and subtleties. Even beyond writing, though, what we hear can get taken for granted. Sometimes I like to simply be still and pay attention to everything around me. I start with the smallest details. Sight: The shadows overlapping on the sidewalk, the lady bug crawling on a park bench. Touch: the breeze on my neck, the blades of grass scratching my ankle, the pebbles pressing through my sandal. Sound: distant shouts from a baseball game, the jangle of a dog's collar, someone ripping open a candy wrapper, the clack of heels on concrete, the rustle of newspaper blowing across the road.

I once read that people become addicted to noise, that we stop really hearing what’s around us, that we constantly need noise, have to fill up what we think is silence because we’ve become immune to the smaller sounds. Walking around a city is a constant barrage of noise—sirens, horns, trucks rumbling, bus brakes hissing, more horns and sirens. Yesterday, a cement truck with its rocky load churning and churning followed me for blocks and around a traffic circle. The city is an assault on the senses. And when we urbanites get away from the constant auditory barrage, we often fail to hear the nuances of other sounds. The article I read said that if someone who was used to constant noise were to go camping, for example, it would take a couple of days to be able to “hear” the detailed orchestra of nature. It is too easy to forget this kind of hearing, this kind of listening.

On an afternoon several years ago, during one of my high school track meets, I stood by the track cheering on my teammates. One of our fastest runners stood next to me. “Spikes on a track are my favorite sound,” she said. She meant the spiked shoes runners wear and the sound of those small metal points going up and down against the dirt lanes as the runners raced to the finish line—sweat and speed as sound.

Her words struck me. At fifteen, I had never thought about my favorite sound. People always ask about your favorite color or food or book but nobody ever asks about your favorite sound. So I started to. I began a list and tacked it up on my bulletin board to remind me to consider sound when writing.

Some of our favorite sounds:

Ice skates on ice, slapping mud against a pottery wheel, dried leaves beneath your feet, the scratch and fuzz of an old record playing, logs popping in a fire, typing on an old typewriter, revving a car’s engine, falling snow, the ocean tide, falling rain

The original list contains more, but that’s in a box somewhere, too. Tell me other favorite sounds—I’m always curious what people will say because it often gives some kind of insight into who they are and also because it forces me to think differently about what I hear and listen to. For me, all of these sounds have different shapes, colors, and textures, and in some way, people give this to me when they make me more conscious of sounds to listen for.

I have much more to say about synesthesia as related to sound and the other senses, but that’s a whole different post, and the book I want to refer to is—you guessed it—also in a box. Or, OK, I confess, I put all my books into paper Trader Joe’s bags to make them easier to carry. It’s somewhere in a bag, which somehow seems worse than it being in a box. In any case, I haven’t even touched on the colorful effect of music, but I wanted to mention Josh Ritter’s concert that R. and I attended last week, which was filled with many hues. Attending any kind of musical performance is always fascinating and entertaining because of the show of colors and shapes caused by the music. It’s Fantasia in my head. And Josh was fantastic, especially because you could tell how much fun he was having. The crowd was having it too. He’s also quite funny.

--C.