The World in Chocolate

01. Best chocolate high I ever had was in Paris, at Angelina’s on the rue du Rivoli. For six American bucks you get a two-cup pot of dark rich molten lava—they call it African—with a side dish of fresh whipped cream. The after-effect is as deeply warming and satisfying as a good bout of sex.

02. Worst chocolate in my experience, Israeli. Too sweet and grainy. Plus it just doesn't seem to fit the terrain when you’re walking with a church tour down the Valley of Kidron.

03. European TV commercials push Kinder Buenos to mothers as a good and healthful treat for their children. Kinder Buenos come in tiny bars, just right for small hands, and are a light wafer and creamy hazelnut on the inside with a sweet milk chocolate covering. A grown woman will need a bunch of these to achieve any mood alteration.

04. A chocolate fix you have to work for: Mexican hot chocolate. There was a store on West Fourteenth in Manhattan that sold huge dusty chunks of the stuff. The idea is that you grate the chunk over a slowly heating saucepan of milk and add sugar to taste. You could also get an authentic wooden hot chocolate beater at the store too, but a plain spoon is sufficient.

05. Hershey chocolate bars in Manila: Eat them fast. They melt. Kids sell them on the street. People in the Philippines, like my mother, have warm memories of Hershey bars from the American GIs in World War Two.

06. Someone gave me a 16-ounce dark chocolate bar with chili bits in it for Christmas. I’ve been eating it in small doses and just finished it last night. Verdict: The heat of the chili bits feels like it’s dissolving the butterfat of the chocolate, but of course that’s not true. The novelty of the taste is not addictive. As a matter of fact it makes the whole thing sort of mediciney.

07. Tried Lindt’s 85% solid cocoa content chocolate bar and that did definitely taste mediciney. For me the highest percentage a chocolate bar can have and still taste good is 70%.

08. Leonidas, especially if you get it fresh in Brussels, is much too buttery and delicate for American palates. We want the slam-bang thrill of chocolate hitting the roof of the mouth at once.

09. Nicest thing about Cadburys is that you can get them in a vending machine at the train station. Most reassuring thing I ever saw in London was a mature City-dressed chap—Burberry, brolly, briefcase, the works—plugging in his 50p and watching his raisin-nut bar slide easily down into the retrieval bin. That is civilization.

10. What you cannot get (almost) anywhere else except in San Francisco: A fresh, free sample of See’s chocolate with any little purchase at all. Yum. See’s might just be the greatest chocolate shop the world has ever seen.

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