the queen of sheba

notwithstanding the fact that there are probably hundreds of classificatory types of chocolate cake, the most useful order I find for organising this unruly subspecies of cake is with the following three categories:
i) flour and cocoa, no chocolate
ii) flour and chocolate, with or without the addition of cocoa
iii) flourless with chocolate
it should be noted that the family has not been seen to include a flourless cake with cocoa but without chocolate (at least by me- this is the kind of chocolate cake I would likely ignore) and that the latter two genera are usually imminently more satisfying than examples from the former, although cake batter made with cocoa is quite nice to eat raw, if you're into that sort of thing.

food phylum aside, a French recipe from the third category seems to have become deservedly popular above many others, it is Reine de Saba or the Queen of Sheba. to trace the literature of this recipe suggests it came to England and Australia through Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking, and via Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking to the United States.

in The Age this year Stephanie Alexander published a version close to David's, in which she notes that the original recipe 'gives the chocolate quantity as "one-quarter of a pound". Many cooks have increased that quantity, although I see no need to', which was an immediate incentive for me to defy restraint and boost the chocolate quotient for a slightly richer, denser cake. the recipe usually includes coffee and brandy too, which I substituted entirely for scotch: I tend to keep my coffee and dessert separate, and we've drunk the bar dry of brandy, rum, muscat and most of the liquers.

the special texture of this cake is achieved by two important factors: leaving the centre a little undercooked to preserve the fudgy feel of chocolate, and, at risk of banging on like Delia, knowing when to stop beating the eggwhites. you should have a soft, voluminous white mass, not stiff building material.

finally, I have no suitable answer as to why this cake was named the Queen of Sheba, when à la Reine usually denotes special dishes with chicken or eggs. perhaps it's because somewhere in the Old Testament the Queen supposedly enticed Solomon with the words "I am black and comely..." and that she is, that she is.





my take on Reine de Saba

150g dark chocolate
100g butter
3 eggs
2 tablespoons Scotch whiskey
3/4 cup ground almonds
1/2 cup caster sugar

preheat the oven to 160°c.

melt the chocolate and butter over a gentle heat.

break the egg whites into a clean bowl and place the yolks in a separate mixing bowl.

beat the sugar into the egg yolks until the mixture is pale and creamy, then mix in the whiskey.

add the melted chocolate, stirring well to prevent splitting, then mix in the ground almonds.

butter and line a cake tin* and check the oven temperature.

at the last minute, beat the eggwhites to soft peaks and add to the chocolate batter in three stages to gradually lighten the mixture and preserve the aeration of the final addition.

baking time should correspond to the size of the tin. see note. as the centre should be undercooked it's best to remove the cake when the surface springs back from a light press, before it rises enough to crack. it will sink a little when it cools.

the cake is quite fragile and should be removed carefully. as it's a moist texture anyway there's no harm in allowing it to cool in the tin and turning it out once it's firmed up a little (this is usually ill-advised as condensation would destroy a delicately textured cake such as sponge).

dust with icing sugar.

* this is a fairly small cake. I like deep, fudgy sorts of shapes so I use a small tin designed for the top tier of a wedding cake, about 18cm diameter. this needs about 40 minutes in the oven but for wider, flatter cakes check at about 20 minutes.

of corn, chocolate and cashews

"But we in England usually boyl the Chocolate with the water, and some to make it more dainty, though less wholesome, use therein Eggs and Milk."

-- Phillipe S. Dufour, 1685

I was wondering wondering when milk turned up in chocolate preparations, given that for most of the history of the bean it has been prepared into a drink made with water.

fragments of language and culture pieced together by Mesoamerican linguists, epigraphers and archaeologists locate the origin of chocolate in late Olmec civilisation, known as the Mixe-Zoquean language family or Izapan culture. they named chocolate, for which linguists have reconstructed the phonetic "kakawa".

before kakawa, there is evidence of an important Olmec process, which is thought to have contributed to chocolate: "nixtamalization". it refers to corn. pounding dried maize kernals into an edible form was probably hard work, and boiling them would've taken ages, so efficient Olmec housewives (they had "housewives"?) are credited with inventing the process which sees maize softened by cooking with white lime, wood ash or other possible additions such as burnt snail shells. Boiled and left to cool in this solution, the pericarp of each grain was easily removed and the soft remains could be made into a dough (masa in Spanish, nixTAMALLI in Nahuatl and hot TAMALES to Robert Johnson, yeah...) nixtamalization increases the amino acid content of the maize through the action of the alkali on protein, resulting in a nutritious, high protein food. take away the process (as Europeans did when they got their grubby mitts on New World maize, because they had mills that could grind the kernals without soaking) and you get pellegra and other deficiency conditions.

but corn is not chocolate. the tenuous but valid leap to be made here is that a civilisation which has time to sit around while the hard work has been taken out of subsistence preparation can invent a few luxuries, like ritual, religion and chocolate. hence prepared cacao drink is thought to have been a ritual substitute for human blood in sacrifices, a delicious supply of complex alkaloids and stimulation and probably an aphrodisiac. the Olmec origin myth, the saga of the Hero Twins, features the slain god of maize and son of the creator mother and father, his severed head hung on a tree in the underworld. the tree is depicted in later renditions as a cacao tree however is not an integral part of the myth. the potent element in the mythology is maize, which finds its way from the underworld to the earth via the Hero Twins, born on the earth to an underworld woman impregnated by the severed head. they later return to the underworld as part of their heroic conquest and raise their father, the maize god, from the dead, thus bringing maize, the staff of life, to the earth.

so little physical evidence remains of the Olmec culture. if they kept written records the material (perhaps bark) has not survived. what has been reconstructed is the root of cultural elements documented in Mayan codices and artefacts. cacao and the Hero Twins passed from the Olmec to the later Maya (descendants of the Classic Maya, who apparently spontaneously combusted), where cacao became increasingly important. gods are drawn holding cacao pods, and hieroglyphs explain that cacao is what the gods eat. other glyphs appearing in cacao related texts can be identified as meaning "water", which makes cacao drink; "foam", a word related to water; and "chilli" and "fruity", possible flavourings to add to the drink. additionally there is a verb which has no equivalent in English but translates as "to pour water/cacao from one vessel to another from a height sufficient to create foam". in this way cacao was dissolved in water, flavoured, and mixed through several pourings to create a frothy chocolate drink fit for the gods, but consumed by humans, maybe only the elite and as part of a daily worshipping ritual.

skipping the brief but brutal Toltec hegemony, the Aztecs and their tequila, (octli, a drink fermented from the agave plant), both civilisations continuing the chocolate-drinking legacy shown them by the Maya. and passing over that most arbitrary Line of Demarcation in 1493 drawn across the New World by the depraved Pope Borgia, and the subsequent Spanish conquest, we come to chocolate in Europe. it was made to the Mayan recipe, but with the addition of sugar to make the bitter alkaloids more palatable. the Spanish introduced the sugar, the French quickly picked it up and also made a sweet version, the Italians made a version too dark and roasted for the French palette, and the English, rightfully the brunt of many culinary jokes, made it with milk. obviously at some point the French also started doing this with the bowl-cup thing, but the earliest historical reference to chocolate and milk I could find is the aforementioned quote from a Frenchman unhappily exiled in England in 1685.

I like milk, so I see the merits in a chocolate and milk preparation. but there is no escaping that the taste of chocolate becomes adulterated by flavour of milk and cream. if you really want to taste chocolate, melt a high cocoa* solid content chocolate such as 70% in a little boiling water. I first came across this in a cake recipe devised by a chemistry nut who illuminated the taste adulteration presented by the addition of dairy. I was amazed by how right the claim is, especially as it seems more intuitive to control the splitting of chocolate by melting it in fat, such as butter or cream. you can actually melt chocolate with the addition of any hot liquid but careful stirring is required to produce a smooth ganache that doesn't split.

what else can carry the flavour of chocolate without ruining it? this question brings the history of chocolate to contemporary Northcote. if you go to Coco Loco on High St you can have cashew milk (or Kashew Mylk, to Mr. Loco), made I'm guessing in the same way as the Italian latte di mandorle (almond milk). cashew milk goes into Coco Loco's chocolates and truffles, and chocolate drinks, and numerous other tempting chocolatey creations which taste of pure chocolate instead of milk and cream, and are then completely vegetable-origin (except the white chocolate things, of which I must recommend the cardamom and pistachio drink and truffle).

nuts! chocolate in nut milk! está loco...

* cocoa is the preferred British English term for the part of the plant that the rest of the world refer to as cacao, although confusingly the unprocessed beans are called cocoa on the New York Commodities Market.

Images, quotes and references from The True History of Chocolate By Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe.

Thames & Hudson, 2000.

warm soft gooey chocolate pudding

inspired by the version made at cicciolina

for 4

150g chocolate

75g butter

2 eggs

1 egg yolk

3 tbsp pl flour

1/3 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 190° c.

Butter and flour 4 small ramekins.

Melt butter and chocolate together.

Whisk eggs, sugar and flour to a batter then

add cooled chocolate. Mix until just combined,

too much aeration will cook the centre of the puddings,

and these are best with a gooey centre in a cakey shell.

Bake for 8-12 minutes depending on your gooey desires.

At 12 minutes the puddings will most likely be entirely

cooked through.

Serve hot with cold pouring cream for the centre.

They can be carefully unmoulded but will have a floury

outer, which can be dusted with icing sugar or

cocoa.