When I was three years old, my father, badly stricken with the mumps, was hospitalised. Refusing to be stretchered out, he insisted on walking to the ambulance instead, wrapped in the brown blanket my sister and I used to saddle up the back of the sofa with, riding imaginary horses to the theme tune of The High Chaparral.
One of the ambulance men gave me a pacifying box of Smarties to which I clung, as I watched my dad go. Moments later I would ask for a chair to be pulled over to the sink, and washed the Smarties clean of their colour, lining them up neatly, now white and orderly, along the ridges of the draining board. Like all traumas, the memory is set and unchanging. (My dad came back and lived another 47 years.)
No chocolate can fully heal the hurts of today, but there are many fantastic, small chocolate manufacturers that need trade right now, and it is these that I shall be focusing on in the next weeks. The chocolate I’ve been returning to these last few days is Chocolarder’s 55% Milk Gingerbread (£5.50, 70g, chocolarder.com). It reminds me of the warming spices of Christmas and, staying in at the moment, with the world quiet outside, it reminds me of a bizarre yuletide. Except it’s spring. Aptly, it’s a seasonal chocolate, only available twice a year: Christmas and Easter.
For all those baking bread, if you can shape your dough into a baguette (go you!), laying some pieces of your favourite chocolate along the middle length gives each tear of the bread a nice surprise.
And don’t we all need those right now?
