Chocolate lovers may not realize the debt they owe the lowly midge.
The microscopic tropical insect is responsible for pollinating cacao flowers, which in turn give rise to cacao pods, source of America's favorite flavor: chocolate.
Despite centuries of popularity, however, chocolate remains shrouded in mystery.
We can breed garlic that doesn't give you bad breath, but we still don't know what makes chocolate taste the way it does. We can talk about the dangers of saturated fat and how it boosts blood cholesterol, yet puzzle (or is that rejoice?) that saturated // fat-laced chocolate doesn't act that way.
Christmas is the year's biggest chocolate candy holiday, followed by Easter and Valentine's Day, according to Lisbeth Echeandia, publisher of Confectioner magazine. Last year, Easter chocolate alone registered $104 million in retail sales, according to Nielsen Marketing Research.
That's about 10 percent of total chocolate sales for 1993. In 1992, the United States produced 2.657 billion pounds of chocolate candy with a retail value of $10 billion, says the Chocolate Manufacturers Association.
Put another way, Americans ate more than enough chocolate to bury Washington in the stuff a Hershey bar thick.
The fact that chocolate candy melts at body temperature -- the bittersweet cocoa butter oozing like warm honey across your tongue -- is part of its appeal. But we'd all be savoring Crisco if that were the whole story.
Chocolate is "perhaps the most puzzling flavor known. . . . As many as 30 to 50 specialized compounds all are responsible for the flavor and aroma we know as chocolate," says Jeff Morgan, a spokesman for the M&M Mars Corp. in Elizabethtown, Pa.
Scientists do know that cacao beans, surrounded by fleshy pulp when removed from their pods, taste nothing like the final product. After harvest, they're piled in a heap, covered and allowed to ferment. In four to six days, much of the pulp disintegrates. Then the beans are dried, usually in the sun.
The metamorphosis to chocolate doesn't occur until after the beans are roasted and their outer shells discarded. The nibs that remain are milled to produce chocolate liquor (not alcoholic), which the trusty cocoa press -- invented in 1828 -- separates into cocoa butter and cocoa solids.
Before the cocoa press, chocolate was enjoyed as a beverage, giving rise to chocolate houses, not unlike coffeehouses, in London during the 1700s.
