I’m fond of both milk and dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is yummy kiddy comfort food. Dark chocolate is more sophisticated, more bitter, more ‘adult’. It’s also less likely to melt at inconvenient times, so helping you preserve that more sophisticated appearance.
But the problem, I find, is that dark chocolate often has too little taste. Even the better brands can be hard, waxy, slightly bitter slabs that don’t actually give much enjoyment, especially when you get to the higher-cocoa-content variants. More ‘fix’ than ‘fun’. Espresso vs latte. (But espresso, I think, has more flavour. Certainly more variety of flavour.)
And so I often think back nostalgically to the days of my youth, when Marks & Spencer sold what was, in my mind, the perfect Swiss chocolate bar.
It was a simple bar of dark chocolate, with a milk chocolate centre.
Bitter and yet sweet. Soft and yet crunchy. Non-melty, and yet easy to bite. Sophisticated and yet yummy. Yin and yet yang.
It seems so obvious: the ‘flat white’ of chocolate. And, as is generally the case with M&S food, it was very good. It could certainly have turned its nose up at anything made Mr Cadbury, and as for Mr Hershey… well, let’s not go there.
Now, we didn’t have anything as smart as an M&S Food store in the little town where I grew up, so this was a special treat which occasionally appeared after my mother returned from shopping in a larger metropolis. Perhaps its rarity, combined with rosy nostalgia, has elevated it to an unwarranted state of perfection in my mind… but there was no doubt it was pretty good!
And yet, at about the time when I graduated from having chocolate bought for me to buying it myself… they stopped selling it! I don’t know why. Perhaps it was marketing: are most customers actually purists who demand either black or white? Or perhaps there were manufacturing challenges of which I am unaware. Not only did Marks and Spencer stop selling it, I haven’t really seen its equivalent anywhere else in the intervening decades.
But if anybody out there knows of a good combination of high-quality dark and milk chocolate, I’d like to return to my childhood, so please let me know…
I was delighted to meet my great-nephew Jonathan — my brother’s daughter’s son — for the first time at the weekend.
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