Fudge

What a crazy week.  Shane, Carolyn's son, was visiting and the time flew by.  He's back home, in New York, now, and recuperating from proving a younger guy can outwork an old fart.  But, us old guys are a little wiser and the proof of that is it was MY backyard that was used as the proving grounds.   Thanks, Shane.  After he left, there was a void around this joint that could be filled only one way - by making about six pounds of Chocolate Fudge! 

There are a ton of recipes for making this treat from the Food of the Gods, and I am sure mine is the best.  When I got it, the first step involved mixing several ingredients.  I'm not gonna tell you how to do it 'cause then yours would be as good as mine.  I will, however, let you know that after making a couple of batches, I added a Preamble to the thing.  The first order of business on the revised instructions state "Start with an empty dishwasher."  Proper execution of the instructions requires the use of enough kitchen stuff as to almost completely fill the appliance.

Chocolate has been with us for about one thousand years.  It wasn't really chocolate back then, it was Cacao.  The earliest record of the bean comes from the Mayan Indians, who thought the Cacao tree indeed was of Divine origin.  The Latin form, "Cacao" is a Mayan word that really means "food of the Gods".  Of course, we modern folks can't get anything right so we corrupted that word to the present one, "cocoa".  The Mayans made a drink by mixing the Cacao beans with Maize and peppers that was allowed to ferment and then consumed during religious ceremonies. 

After the Mayans were rapted, the Aztecs continued man's love affair with this bean.  They couldn't cultivate the crop - they lived too high up the mountains - so it was a relative rarity in their culture and was highly treasured.  Slaves could be paid for with very small amounts of Cacao, and the Aztec emperors collected the beans as taxes.  They also drank fermented mixtures of it during ceremonies. 

Beans were much more highly valued than gold or silver, and when Cortez, the Spanish conqueror of the Aztecs, looked for treasure, he found the Emperor's vaults filled not with gold and silver, but with Cacao beans!   The Aztec word for them was "Xocolatl", which the Spaniards found difficult to pronounce.  The name was changed, and "chocolate" was born.  Sugar and vanilla were added to the Aztec concoction, and Cortez sent the first batch back to Spain.

Shortly after, the beans, instead of the liquid mixture, were dried and shipped back to Spain, where they were ground and sold in a powered form of chocolate.  In 1657 the first of many Chocolate Houses opened in England.  It took another hundred and fifty years, but eventually the Dutch figured out how to extract the bitter cocoa butter from the beans, and twenty years later, in 1847, chocolate, as we know it today, was produced. 

I thank the Good Lord I did not have to wait 1000 years for the batch I made today.  A quick trip to the store, an hour at the stove, and six pounds of the  "Food of the Gods" now rests on my kitchen counter.  Well, there's about five and three quarter pounds there now - Muffy must have been at work. 

Western civilization has improved some things.