Melanie McDonagh: Why is no British festivity complete without chocolate?

Halloween, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, Easter: all traditional festivals are now an opportunity for flogging foil-covered chocolate - and swamping older food traditions
25 October 2013
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Spooky milk chocolate lollies (£1). Chocolate-covered ghost bites (£2). Eyeballs and Pumpkins chocolate balls (£2). Haunted Heads (£1.49). Skeletons and ghosts chocolate shapes. All available, or near identical variants, in a supermarket near you, part of the modern British celebration of Halloween. And all featuring the element without which no British festivity is now complete: chocolate.

On the aisles, the Trick or Treat section is helpfully filled with stuff that you can throw into the goody bags of the children who come calling on the night: chocolate, all of it. Waitrose says its Halloween chocolate sales are up 14 per cent on last year. Certainly when my own children did their sweep of the neighbourhood last year, chocolate accounted for about 95 per cent of the swag they brought home, rejoicing.

Halloween is a fairly new festivity in Britain — imported here directly from America so it’s a squarely commercial thing, without any real grounding in the culture, unlike the sinister and sectarian festivity of Guy Fawkes Night — but I come from the home of Halloween, viz, Ireland. The Irish have been celebrating Halloween for ever. In fact, I rather think it was the Irish who took the idea of the celebration to America, from where it was re-imported here, repackaged as an excuse to market chocolate products and pumpkins and watch slasher movies on telly.

Anyway, I grew up with Halloween and all the old traditions that went with it — the whole thing was a combination of the vigil of the feast of All Souls Day a couple of days later and, subliminally, the Celtic celebration of the same season which had similar associations with the spirit world. When I was small we did dress up with masks, only in our parents’ old clothes rather than ready-made costumes — and I swear, chocolate did not come into the thing at all. When we went round from house to house asking for a penny for the bobbin’, it was nuts and apples we got. Or money if we were lucky.

The distinctive Halloween thing to eat besides the apples and nuts was barmbrack, a nice but plain fruit loaf with a ring in it (the person who got it would be the first to marry, so you can tell how dated it is), which you’d eat with butter. That would actually be a useful import. And way back, people used to eat colcannon, a potato dish made with kale, with rings and thimbles in, for a similar simple exercise in fortune-telling. But ... zero chocolate.

Rather a similar thing happened with Easter. The tradition of eating eggs at Easter goes way back as a metaphor for the Resurrection; it’s preserved in its old form in Eastern Europe, where you still get eggs coloured and decorated for Easter Sunday. But chocolate eggs: now they’re a new thing, an invention of the mid-20th century. Previous generations of Brits might have Simnel cake at Easter or Mother’s Day, with 12 almond balls for the 12 apostles, and lamb for lunch, but chocolate eggs are something distinctively modern.

So why is it that whenever the Brits, or indeed the Americans, celebrate anything, including a festival new to this country, it’s with chocolate? William Sitwell, editor of the Waitrose Food Magazine and a champion of proper chocolate, observed hat he was surprised no retailer had yet thought of flogging chocolate Guy Fawkes, but that’s probably only a matter of time.

Well, obviously it’s all a ruse by the chocolate-makers and retailers: there are better margins to be had on chocolate skulls than apples. But it also marks a failure of imagination on our part, an inability to preserve genuine tradition. It’s also part of the contemporary trend to go over the top in terms of calorific consumption. Brits eat on average 11kg or 24lb of chocolate a year. The Swiss eat more, but theirs is nicer. They don’t eat chocolate largely made up of sugar and fat covered in pumpkin foil.

The nadir of the trend is the Heston Blumenthal Christmas pudding for Waitrose, which does indeed feature the traditional dried-fruit mix but with a molten chocolate centre. It may be delicious — I don’t know — but it’s piling richness on richness and adding to an already heady mix the one ingredient that we have come to associate with the season and celebration: chocolate

Indeed, Christmas is now another chocolate feast: it’s not just boxes of truffles on the day but chocolate-themed Santas and snowmen (M&S is rather brilliantly doing chocolate Brussels sprouts), chocolate shapes, chocolate cocktails. Once, it wasn’t so: the distinctive elements of Christmas eating were seasonal. Like now, people ate turkeys and geese on the day but sweet things mostly revolved around dried or candied fruit — we still have all that in mince pies and pudding — and exotic fruit such as oranges and clementines...the sort you got in the toe of your stocking. It’s not that people didn’t push the boat out — this was the one time, along with Easter, when they really did — but tastes weren’t dominated as they are now by one element as a synonym for enjoyment and excess: chocolate.

What’s true of Christmas, Halloween and Easter is true of other feasts: Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day. Trad festivals both of them but now a retail opportunity for flogging foil-covered chocs.

This may give the impression that I don’t like the stuff, which would be untrue. I stay awake when I’m tired by eating Bounty bars, and my idea of a treat is to hang out somewhere like William Curley, the swanky chocolatier, with a hot chocolate. In fact, I think we eat too little really good chocolate, the sort with lots of cocoa in, though there’s been something of a Renaissance in chocolate making recently.

But although I like eating it, what I don’t like is the fact that chocolate has taken over the world and has swamped older food traditions amd feasts. It’s time to turn the tide. Hand out apples and nuts when the kiddies of your neighbourhood come Trick or Treating next week. They won’t like it — but you will have the satisfaction of making a stand against a pernicious trend.

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