Easter Chocolates a Shared Tradition, Republican Herald, April 2011

Easter chocolates a shared tradition
Published: April 24, 2011


This year I'm spending Easter in Pottsville, where I'll be joining my family for what has been our traditional Easter dinner ever since I was a child, and I'm wondering how many other families in Schuylkill County will be sitting down to a meal similar to ours.

We'll be having baked ham, along with a variety of salads, and everyone will eat a pickled egg that has been marinating in spiced red beet juice for the past few days.

When in France for Easter, I've taken to making pickled eggs for my friends, and the French always look at them suspiciously when I put one on their plates. Needless to say, in France, no one except my guests has ever tasted this Pennsylvania delicacy.

The typical French Easter menu is a celebration of spring, and the meal begins with the very first asparagus of the season, seasoned with vinaigrette dressing and bits of grated hard-boiled egg. For the main course, the French prefer a leg of roasted spring lamb, accompanied by fresh peas or flageolet beans, which look like tiny pale-green kidney beans. And for dessert, there's a special Easter cake, sponge cake baked in the form of a nest, iced with a chocolate glaze and then sprinkled with homemade chocolate vermicelli, a tasty substitute for straw. Nestled in the center is an assortment of chocolate chicks and eggs, jelly beans and even a few sprigs of spring flowers.

This Easter I'll be eating ham, my Parisian friends will be eating lamb, but there is one Easter tradition we definitely share, and that's chocolate. Before sitting down for their Easter feast, French children, just like those in the USA, set out on an Easter egg hunt. Hanging from branches, hidden in flower beds or in the hollow of a tree, they'll find chocolate eggs, chocolate hens and chicks, chocolate rabbits and even chocolate bells filled with what the French call "friture" - small chocolate fish. And those bells, believe it or not, are the French version of the Easter Bunny.

In France, Peter Cottontail does not come hopping down the bunny trail to deliver chocolates to good little girls and boys. It's the church bells that do his job. At the end of Maundy Thursday, church bells all over France stop ringing and they will not ring again until after Easter Saturday's midnight Mass. During that period of mournful silence, little children are told the bells have flown off to Rome, taking with them a supply of Easter chocolates, to be blessed by the pope. That done, they head back to France, each bell to its respective belfry, dropping chocolates in gardens and on balconies along the way.

A few lucky children may find chocolates made by some of the finest chocolate makers of France, such as Francois Pralus, recognized in 2009 as the best chocolate maker of all of Paris (visitors to the city can sample his products at his shop located at 35 rue Rambuteau, a few steps from the Pompidou Center, on the Right Bank of the Seine).

What makes Pralus unique among French chocolate makers is that he owns a plantation on a small island off the coast of Madagascar, where he produces his own cocoa beans, and where his chocolate production begins. After the harvest, cocoa pods are cleaned and cracked to extract the cocoa beans, which are then sorted and shipped to Paris. There the beans are roasted and ground to a liquid paste, which will be further refined into either cocoa butter, chocolate paste or cocoa powder. To make dark chocolate, the French favorite, Pralus uses chocolate paste, cocoa butter, pure cane sugar, natural vanilla - and nothing else.

Pralus may be unique in owning his own cocoa plantation, but in the area of fine chocolates, he has lots of competition. On the Left Bank, at 132 boulevard Saint-Germain, Georges Larnicol, considered one of the best "chocolate craftsmen" of all of France, has recently arrived from his native Brittany to set up shop. His specialty is chocolate sculptures in the form of dolls, champagne bottles, the Eiffel Tower, cars, giant Easter eggs and even boats.

In fact, in September 2010, he produced a 15-foot sail boat made completely of chocolate and weighing 1.2 tons, which he launched into Concarneau harbor on the coast of southern Brittany. The boat floated for more than an hour and only began to sink when spectators turned participants began eating the seaworthy chocolate vessel.

Of course, the French are not the only ones to take chocolate making seriously. The state of Pennsylvania can claim as its own two of America's original chocolate makers, both who got their start in Philadelphia. Henry Oscar Wilbur, a candy maker in that city since 1865, began producing chocolates in 1884, and in 1894, he turned them into "Wilbur Buds." In 1928, his company moved to the town of Lititz, Lancaster County, still home to the Wilbur Chocolate Co. today.

Milton S. Hershey also started in Philadelphia, opening a candy shop there in 1876, when he was 18 years old. Business was not good, however, and he moved on, travelling all the way to Colorado, before he finally headed back East to settle in his native Lancaster County, where he began making chocolate in 1894 and the rest is history.

Not only did this man give us the "nickel bar" and the Hershey kiss with its trademarked "plume," he left a lasting mark as a philanthropist on the town that bears his name.

Thus the state of Pennsylvania has played an important role in the history of chocolate, but few may know that thanks to a researcher at Penn State University, it may play an even bigger role in chocolate's future. In 2010, Dr. Mark Guiltinan and his research team were credited with the complete sequencing of the cacao genome of the finest of all chocolate trees, the obroma cacao, first domesticated by the Mayan people of Central America 3,000 years ago.

If this DNA sequencing can lead to increased breeding and cultivation of these trees, it means more superior quality chocolate for chocolate lovers around the world, a happy thought for those of us biting into Easter chocolates today.

And for the true chocolate lover who might also be planning a trip to Paris, keep these dates in mind: from Oct. 20-24, Paris will be hosting France's biggest chocolate fair, the "Salon du chocolat" - 40,000 square feet of chocolate, with free samples galore!

(Honicker can be reached at honicker.republicanherald@gmail.com)