A scientist in the kitchen

Sunday breakfasts are quite special at home, where we eat the works. The works consisting of gralic fired rice, grilled pork belly, onion and tomato sidings and hot cholate eh! Yes, we have quite a heavy breakfast at home on Sundays and could go for more than an hour, usually until the animals at home start to get impatient for their victual.

But this post is not about breakfast (though it is my favorite meal of the day) nor about the grilled pork belly (which is grilled simply with salt and no other marinade). This is about the hot chocolate that comes with our breakfast.

Having hot chocolate never fails to remind me about the Noli Me Tangere, a novel written in Spanish by our national hero, Jose Rizal. I read this in high school and enjoyed it so much, especially with our analyses of the novel and the relevance of the novel with our time. Plus, I am a Rizalist at heart and he is simply my hero. Well, anyway, to get back to the novel, the Noli (as we call it), was written in the 1880s, a portrayal of the Philippines, the Filipinos and the Spanish occupation of the Philippines.

What about chocolate? A chapter in the novel talks about a parish priest serving hot chocolate to guests. Rizal puts it this way:

“Whenever these scandals reached the ears of Padre Salvi (the parish priest), he would smile, cross himself, and recite a paternoster. They called him a grafter, a hypocrite, a Carlist, and a miser: he merely smiled and recited more prayers. The alferez (town mayor) had a little anecdote which he always related to the occasional Spaniards who visited him:

“Are you going over to the convento to visit the sanctimonious rascal there, the little curate? Yes! Well, if he offers you chocolate which I doubt—but if he offers it remember this: if he calls to the servant and says, ‘Juan, make a cup of chocolate, eh!’ then stay without fear; but if he calls out, ‘Juan, make a cup of chocolate, ah!’ then take your hat and leave on a run.”

“What!” the startled visitor would ask, “does he poison people? Carambas!”

“No, man, not at all!”

“What then?”

“‘Chocolate, eh!’ means thick and rich, while ‘chocolate, ah!’ means watered and thin.”

But we are of the opinion that this was a slander on the part of the alferez, since the same story is told of many curates. At least, it may be a thing peculiar to the Order. “

Of course, our version of hot chocolate is always “tsokolate eh”!

The chocolate we use, of course, is not the overly processed and fine-powdered ones. Chocolate tablets or “tableya” is boiled with water until it melts, and then mixed with milk and sugar. In some cases, coconut milk is used instead of cow’s milk. Making tableya takes a long time. It starts with harvesting cacao pods, drying the seeds, roasting it, removing the seed coat, and grinding the beans with peanut to make a nutty and creamy chocolate. It is shaped into balls or flattened into tablets and dried.

I have found memories of making tableya. My grandmother has several cacao trees at her house. She would harvest the pods. Pop it often and let us, her grandchildren, eat the pulp in each seed. We can have as many as we want, as long a we return the seeds to her. She would gather the seeds and place them in a flat basket, and dry it for several weeks. She would patiently watch that it is exposed to the sun, transfering to another place as the sun shifts position. My cousins and me? We are always budgering her, wanting to know when she is going to grind them into tablets. I used to help grind the beans. Later on, when we had our own farm, my grandfather planted cacao seedlings. When they started to fruit, my sister and I made chocolate tableya just the way my grandmother did. Sadly, the trees got damaged by a fungal disease and we never made them anymore (Now my training is plant pathology, and I’m thinking of planting cacao once more).

These days we buy powdered chocolate from a local brand or whenever I go to Chinatown in Manila, I buy them from shop that has been making chocolate tableya since the 1930s.

To make “tsokalete eh”:
5 chocolate tableya
4 cups of water

Put water and tableya into a pot and bring to a boil. Simmer until tableya has melted. Check the thickness of the chocolate, not too thin nor too thick. If too thick, the chocolate granules can stuck on your throat and ruin your tsokolate eh” experience!

***

This is my contribution to the winter edition of Novel Food, hosted by Simona and Lisa.

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