Spice up meats with chocolate and chillis
Any film about food arouses interest. A film about chocolate will have lines of drooling groupies queuing round the block. Foodies salivated over the stream of courses in ‘Babette’s Feast’, but after watching ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ once at the flicks, rented it over and over again, to glean the secret ingredients of dishes that had its protagonists dazed with passion. How do I know? I just do.
Lasse Hallström’s latest film, ‘Chocolat’, looks like it’s about to cause a similar stir among lovers of the cocoa bean. It dwells, lovingly, on the power of chocolate, carefully doctored at the hands of Juliette Binoche, to melt even the most uptight citizen of the small French town, into which she and her daughter have blown in their Red Riding Hood cloaks. Through the goodies from her exotic chocolaterie, the repressed townspeople rediscover a lust for life. Something in the truffles brings the zing back into one couple’s sex life. A birthday roast chicken smothered in gleaming chocolate sauce is eaten in glazed-eyed rapturous silence by the guests. Into her cups of hot chocolate Binoche slips a little chilli – a potent combination and one that goes back to the Aztecs.
Chocolate, as the townsfolk of the sleepy hamlet soon discover, is a powerful thing. It contains phenylethylamine, the same chemical stimulated naturally in the brain by falling in love. Chilli, too, is an aphrodisiac, and both are essential ingredients in mole (pronounced molay), the sauce that, when covering turkey, makes one of the most respected ceremonial dishes in Mexico.
If you’re worried about the effect of putting chocolate into savoury dishes, don’t be. Take a leaf out of Ms Binoche’s book and give it a try. Chocolate in any stewed meat dish is unidentifiable, providing less of a sweetness than a silkiness. It’s often the secret addition to Texan chilli con carne (an altogether different dish from the Mexican ‘chillies and meat’). And actually very little is used.
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