On food
Someone Must Stand for Milk Chocolate
Dark chocolate is bad. Stop lying about it.
[I originally wrote about this issue in a piece published in 2019, and forgot about it. Then yesterday, Geo Snelling — who is usually brilliant — commented on the latest Sybarite newsletter, and claimed that the Nestle TollHouse Cookie recipe was not the best cookie recipe AND THEN SUGGESTED A COOKIE RECIPE THAT USES DARK CHOCOLATE CHIPS. And you know what? Enough already. I’m reviving the 2019 piece with some updates/edits for 2023. It’s time to take a stand.]
It was 1978 and I was seven years old. My mother pulled a pot roast out of the oven and dumped a can of pears on it. Then she melted two Hershey bars, poured those on top too, and yelled “we’re having molé!” My father picked up the phone and ordered a pizza.
The next day I asked my father what happened. He was an organic chemistry professor and always told me that cooking was just chemistry, so I figured he could answer this. Plus, my mother wasn’t speaking to either of us.
“Well, among other things, Mom used the wrong chocolate,” my father said. “She should have used dark chocolate for molé. Easy mistake.” It was also a mistake because most molés don’t even have any chocolate at all, but this was the seventies and my mother was winging…
