Even if "candy is dandy but liquor is
quicker" (or "candy is dandy, but sex won't rot your teeth"), the sweet stuff
has much to say for itself as a love food. Often we think only of chocolate when
we say candy, but there are actually over 2000 varieties of candy made from
eighty different
agricultural products. Americans alone consume almost four
billion pounds of such sweets annually, twenty pounds per person, from fruit
flavored sours to chewy caramels, making candy production the seventh largest
food industry in the U.S.
Peppermint sticks, sour balls, toffees, peanut brittles, fudges, jellies, gums,
marshmallows, nuggets, taffies, etc., etc., etc., have all been the latest
aphrodisiac fad at one time or another among lovers. In middle nineteenth
century America, for example, mint lozenges imprinted with "I love you" were all
the rage among sweethearts. More recently, in Germany, according to a wire
service report, sales of licorice have shot up as men have taken to giving their
women licorice sticks instead of chocolate. The girls claim that the licorice
makes them feel "sexy" and German scientists, after probing reports that
hundreds of German girls on holiday at coastal resorts were eating licorice
instead of ice cream, confirm that licorice does contain traces of the female
sex hormone estrogen. But then licorice was long a medicine before it was a
sweet. The Chinese believed it to be a preserver of youth and strength, and the
Brahmans of ancient India vouched for its effectiveness as a sexual tonic and
beautifying agent, while the Egyptian pharaohs enjoyed a stimulating beverage
made of licorice called mai sus. The Chinese still chew the root for endurance
in coition and the Hindus make a tea with it with milk and honey to increase
their sexual vigor.
Candy has been around since at least 4000 years ago, when the Egyptians enjoyed
a well established confectionary art, and each pharaoh's retinue included one
cook who could turn out appetizing confections made of honey, flour, almonds,
dates and figs. Similarly, fruits, nuts, sweet herbs and spices mixed with honey
were the sweetmeats of the early Greeks and Romans. It was probably the Greeks
who brought the word candy into the language. It seems that a favorite of the
lusty troops of Alexander the Great was a Persian delicacy called kand a sweet
reed garnished with honey, spices and coloring. The word candy itself either
came to us from this kand Alexander's men brought to Greece, or from the Arab
word for sugar, quand.Candy became more important in world commerce with the spread of sugar cane
culture beginning in the 15th century, and gradually made the transition from a
delight enjoyed by the wealthy few to a relatively low cost treat available to
everyone. Legends abound about almost every variety of the sweet, but chocolate
probably leads the list. An article in a leading woman's magazine several years
back listed chocolate as one of the top ten aphrodisiacs. No one knows how the
Cosmopolitan Ms's conducted their research, but their conclusions about this
high source of quick energy seem justified historically. Chocolate, in its many
forms, has been used as a love food since long before the day of St. Valentine.
Chocolate is made from cacao, the fruit of
the evergeen tree Theobroma cacao, which was named by the Swedish botanist
Linnaeus 250 years ago and translates as "cacao, food of the gods." Cacao and
kola are the only two members of the large botanic family of Sterculiaceae that
man uses as food. Inside each cacao pod are twenty to fifty beans, 400 to a
pound, beans that modern day Ecuadorians still call pepe de oro or seeds of gold,
so important are they to the national economy. This has always been so in South
America. The Aztecs used the cacao bean as currency, the unit 8000 indicated by
a sack holding 8000 cacao beans, and the Mayans did likewise. In fact, the
Mayans even had trouble with "counterfeiters" of cacao beans. It seems that
Mayan con men filled hollowed beans with dirt and passed them off as the real
thing.
The Mayans paid in chocolate at their bawdy
houses, a fact noted by Bishop de Landa, who ministered to Cortez's soldiers.
"He who wants a Mayan public woman for his lustful use can have one for eight to
ten cacao beans," the Bishop wrote which is something to be remembered the next
time you buy or receive a small box of bon bons. Apparently, the chocolate
sexually stimulated both men and women, for the Aztecs drank it in honor of Xochiquetzal, their version of Aphrodite, the goddess of
love.
Although Columbus brought back the first dark
brown almond shaped cacao beans from the New World, it was the Emperor Montezuma
who convinced Europeans that chocolate was an ambrosia for the gods, serving
chocolatl to Cortez and his captains in great golden goblets. Montezuma may even
have been the inventor of chocolate ices, for it's said that he used to send
members of his court to the heights of a nearby volcano to bring back blocks of
snow, over which other minions poured whipped chocolate. But he made chocolatl
the royal drink of the Aztecs and forbade it to the women of the court, much to
the dismay of the ladies, who had to go to unladylike lengths to get it.
After Cortez brought chocolatl back to Spain,
his countrymen improved upon its bitterness by sweetening and flavoring it with
cane sugar, vanilla and cinnamon, and finally serving it as a hot drink. From
the very beginning chocolate was denounced by the clergy in fifteenth century
Spain as "immoral and provocative of immorality," but it remained in favor with
the nobility for its reputedly powerful effects. The Spanish kept the new treat
a secret for nearly a century, but monks finally leaked the recipe out and hot
chocolate soon became the most fashionable drink in the licentious French court.
By 1657, English "chocolate houses" began to appear and about a century after
that, in 1765, the first American chocolate factory opened. All the while, the
clergy throughout Europe continued to condemn the sweet and there are records of
monasteries prohibiting chocolate for their monks because of its firing the
furnace power.
No doubt these clerical admonitions were
partly inspired by the reckless use made of chocolates, which were coated with
ambergris, cantharides and other powerful sexual stimulants. Moreau of Tours
gives an exaggerated account of how the Marquis de Sade used Spanish Fly in this
way. De Sade may not have been guilty at all, but the story does describe what
was a not uncommon practice among the more depraved nobility. Moreau writes:
"M. de Sade gave a ball, to which he invited a numerous company. A splendid
supper was served at midnight: now the marquis had mixed with the dessert a
profusion of chocolate, flavored with vanilla, which was found delicious and of
which everybody freely partook. All at once the guests, both men and women, were
seized with a burning sensation of lustful ardour, the cavaliers attacked the
ladies without any concealment. The essence of cantharides circulating in their
veins left them neither modesty nor reserve in the imperious pleasures; excess
was carried to the most fatal extremity; pleasure became murderous; blood flowed
upon the floor, and the women only smiled at the horrible effects of their
uterine rage..."
Casanova used chocolate widely, though more wisely, in his seductions, his
memoirs mentioning chocolate and chocolates more frequently than any love
stimulant but champagne. Dumas also favored the sweet and Brillat-Savarin
devotes a chapter to it in his Physiology of Taste, informing us that "The Spanish ladies of the New World are passionately fond of
chocolate; and not satisfied with taking it several times a day, they even have
brought it to church." But chocolate became more popular than ever with lovers
after a Swiss named Daniel Peter invented milk
chocolate in 1876. Since then it has become the foremost of Valentine gifts, and
on St. Nicholas Eve (Dec. 5th) Dutch lovers exchange chocolate initials, or use
them as place cards at the dinner table.
The delicacies made from chocolate would
require volumes to record, ranging from Japanese chocolate flavored honey bars
and South American chocolate covered ants to the hot chocolate laced with cognac
often served to lovers on Majorca. Several recommended for a love feast are the
famous Brazilian iced drink called Chocolatl Gelado; the Hungarian Csokolade
Mignon, chocolate cake squares filled with jam and topped with mocha frosting;
the Australian Lamingstons, chocolate frosted chocolate squares coated with
coconut; the Israeli Chocolate Date Nut Pie, made of mashed dates, milk
chocolate, angel food cake, whipped cream and chopped nuts; and the traditional
Irish dish, Swans Jelly, which combines cream puff pastry, melted chocolate, and
whipped cream, the "swan" resting on a bed of pale green jelly.
But then perhaps you'd be better off sticking
with a plain old fashioned box of chocolates.