In Helena, Montana, a slightly battered candy canister, probably on the order of forty years old, returns every holiday for a refill to the Parrot, a venerable confection store on North Main Street. The Parrot has wooden booths and a working soda fountain, makes its own ice cream and fudge sauce, and hand-dips it chocolate candies. The woman who brings in the canister has it refilled for Valentine's Day and throughout the year with a house specialty: chocolate-covered almond "rocos," her husband's favorite.
"She started coming in when she was first married," says Nancy Duensing, whose family owns the Parrot. "Her husband is a retired dentist in his sixties."
Chocolate and love, a rich blend indeed.
The pairing traces back centuries, at least to Aztec Emperor Montezuma, who made chocolate a part of his regular visits to his harem. According to some accounts, he plied his concubines with chocolate prior to his trysts. Another version says he drank the chocolate--up to ninety glasses in an evening. Casanova also believed chocolate to be an aid in seduction and he routinely served it to his lovers. Although condemned by seventeenth-century religious leaders as "the beverage of Satan," chocolate was warmly received by the French court, notably by Louis XIV himself, who accepted it as a gift from his fiancée, Maria Theresa of Spain.
"Sweets for the sweet," wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet, and with chocolate vying with long-stemmed roses as the gift de rigueur this Valentine's Day, that sentiment clearly prevails in all manner of shapes and forms. At the St. Moritz chocolate shop on New York's Madison Avenue, $35 will buy a 1 ½ pound, solid chocolate telephone accompanied by the greeting: "I just called to say I love you." Or how about a chocolate casting of a woman's torso--neck to navel--bearing the words "Breast Wishes?"
In fact, it now seems there are few things left you can't find done up in chocolate. Jigsaw puzzles, Monopoly boards, and chess sets have been devoured by game playing chocolate lovers. Classic autos, golf balls, and tennis rackets have also melted in appreciative mouths. A clever California company offered "bytes" of chocolate, 4.8-ounce chocolate diskettes marketed to the computer crowd. There's even been chocolate-fudge perfume. An enterprising Atlanta firm specializes in chocolate-scented business cards and chocolate corporate logos--appropriate because chocolate is big business, and unquestionably so at Valentine's Day, when consumption rises dizzyingly. The industry reports sales pegged to this single day topping a half-billion dollars in 1985.
Thus it is not by coincidence that the sixth annual Great American Chocolate Festival is set for this Valentine's Day weekend. The four-day celebration will he held, appropriately, at the Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and will unveil the world's largest candy bar--a 2 ½ x 3 ½ x 6-foot version of Hershey's newest confection, Bar None--this one containing who knows how many calories.
To borrow a line from pop singer Tina Turner: "What's love got to do with it?" Why, in fact, is chocolate, a bitter ivory-colored bean before harvesting and processing, so universally loved--and so linked with love? A few years back, an intriguing theory
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