Blood and Chocolate
Why does chocolate seem to substitute for blood in savory European dishes? That’s a question Adam Balic has posed several times. He points, for example, to the use of chocolate in the Catalan dish mar y muntanya.
I’ve been mulling this over and here are my revised thoughts.
1. In the cases that Adam points to, this change occurred before it became difficult or impossible to buy blood in Europe (or so I assume). That is, before the last fifty years.
2. What did blood do in dishes? Several things. It gave a good color. It thickened the sauce. It changed the taste (though I’d need to experiment to see how). It perhaps avoided waste though the households who made such dishes probably did not have economy upppermost in their minds.
But also blood had lots of other properties and associations. It was essential to life. Perhaps humans were even formed from congealed blood. It was one of the four humors and those rich in blood were courageous, violent, passionate, highly sexed and tended to lack reason. For Christians, wine turned into the blood of Christ in the mass. For Jews and Muslims, blood was not to be consumed.
3. So why use chocolate instead of blood? Well, at one level it gives a good color. And it thickens a sauce. And it changes the taste adding complexity and a touch of bitterness.
But it is an incredibly expensive alternative. Blood, I suspect, was readily available and not terribly expensive in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Chocolate was rare and horribly expensive. So was it a sign of prestige to have chocolate instead of blood?
Or did it do the things that blood did but without bad consequences?As Adam points out, in prehispanic America it was probably associated with blood. But it’s not at all obvious that that association was accepted by Europeans. In fact, most of the debate that went on in Europe about how to fit chocolate into their nutritional scheme when they first encountered it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focussed on whether drinking chocolate was a food (like wine but unlike water) and thus broke the strict fast. That doesn’t seem relevant to its use in savory dishes.
So did people think, perhaps, that blood gave strength and courage without clouding the reason? Or did they have something else in mind? Lots to think about.
I guess the answer is that there are many reasons for using chocolate as a blood substitute.
In some cases it is seen as a straight replacement, as in the case of the recent replacement in Tuscan blood pancakes, and in many middle-class recipes for civet type dishes, coq au in, blood is often offered as a replacement.
In older recipes it can be more complex as the seperation of sweet and savory isn’t as clear as today. In fact many “savory” dishes would contain a lot if sugar. During the late 17th-mid 18th century the Northern Italians seem to have used chocolate in a lot savory dishes and there are a few extant examples. As I’m not sure what the original form of the dishes were, I can’t say it the chocolate was replacing blood.
In terms of why chocolate was being used to replace blood, in some cases it is easier to come by then fresh blood and there is a cetain similarity in the colour, texture and flavour given to a dish.
Adam, Thanks so much. I think you’re quite right that in modern dishes it is a straight replacement.
What interests me is why it happened earlier, if it did. Agreed about savory and sweet being mixed. But why go for expensive chocolate?
And many apologies for changing my post on you as you were writing your comment.
I guess one thing to make clear is that this historic chocolate is a very different product to the modern version. Modern chocolate really didn’t exist until the middle of the 19th century. The historic chocolate we are discussing here is much more similar to what most people call “Mexican””Chocolate, although it is also made in Spain, Sicily and South America.
Another issue is how these people saw chocolate. They were pretty obsessive about it’s preceived health properties and even in the 19th and into the 20th century recipes for hot chocolate/cocoa are found in the inavalid cooking sections of cookbooks.
It was also an expensive novelty item. My guess would be that when originally introduced as an expensive item it was used in “savory” cooking for its status in terms of health, expensive and novelty value. Any relationship with blood would be secondary I would think.
I should think that as chocolate use trickled down the ranks, other associations may haved developed, including the fact that it makes a good substitute for blood in some cases.
I’ve written a little about chocolate and peoples reaction to it here:
http://adambalic.typepad.com/the_art_and_mystery_of_fo/2007/06/chaculato_choco.html
In terms of original sources for early European reactions to chocolate, Henry Stubbe’s “The Indian Nectar or a Discourse concerning Chocolata” (1662) is the most interesting and intelligent. Let me know if you haven’t read this.