Celebrating Chocolate
by Tom Geddie
Anyone looking for a little romance to get in the mood for Valentine’s Day might check out Calico Chocolates on West Garland in Grand Saline. There’s nothing better for romance, is there, than chocolate?
Sure, gifts, Tyler roses, and love poems are nice. But in the short, cold month we traditionally set aside for romance, Valentine’s Day, with its Christian and even older Roman traditions, nothing is more sure than chocolate except for, maybe, unconditional love itself.
One Valentine’s Day legend is that Valentine was a priest during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.
Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured. Imprisoned himself, Valentine fell in love with the blind daughter of his jailer. His love for her, combined with his great faith, healed the girl of her blindness before he was put to death.
Whether any of that’s true, Valentine became the patron saint of lovers.
Lynea Harrison sells romance. Not the cheap stuff wrapped in tinfoil and paper on the grocery store and gas station shelves, but the deep, sometimes dark love of real, honest-to-goodness chocolate.
Using both antique and modern molds, the owner of Calico Chocolates in Grand Saline makes edible art in the shapes of flowers, musical instruments, ponies, rabbits, lobsters, cowboy boots, “champagne buckets,” and other shapes. To hold the chocolate, she even makes chocolate boxes and baskets.
In the storefront on West Garland Avenue near downtown Grand Saline, Lynea sells “ordinary” gourmet chocolate and even a small selection of specialty candy bars that you won’t find in other stores for miles and miles around. She chose the name “Calico” because of the light, dark, and milk chocolate colors of chocolate.
Lynea moved to Grand Saline with her husband, Troy Harrison, and three children about five years ago from Dallas, where her husband is a partner in an advertising agency, Valiant Media.
“I was raised in the country and wanted my kids raised in the country,” said
Lynea, who grew up in Idalou near Lubbock.
With the kids now ages 13, 7, and 5, Lynea was looking for something to do
outside the house.
“I had been a hairdresser and makeup artist for 12 years, and didn’t want to do
that anymore,” she said. “One day I wanted a piece of chocolate, but there was
no place around here to get one like I wanted.”
She’d spent a year, when she was 19, working for a company in Dallas named Sweet
Confections, where she learned all about chocolate.
“I was looking to start a biz. It dawned on me I could start making chocolate out of my house and sell to my husband’s business as corporate gifts,” she said.
Lynea opened the 1,600-square-foot storefront operation at 501 S. Garland, set up her molds, kitchen, and shelves, and added a few gift items to go along with the chocolate. With a store that sells mostly chocolate, the odds seemed to be against her.
“Most people didn’t have a lot of faith we’d be here very long, but the large orders from outside of Grand Saline keep me in business,” she said.
Most of those orders come from corporations, from trade shows, and weddings, and from word-of-mouth endorsements from customers. For example, Lynea has a large clientele in Longview, “due to a handful of enthusiastic women who love what I do,” she said. “I’m so grateful to them.”
Corporations come to Calico Chocolates for party and gift items, such as logo-embedded chocolates. She built that side of the business with trade shows, too, and with her husband’s corporate contacts and through clients who own companies in Dallas and have weekend homes in the Van Zandt County area.
Lynea doesn’t actually make chocolate. That’s done in faraway places and shipped in 50-pound boxes to Grand Saline, where she re-melts it and makes individual creations.
“It feels like being an artist,” she said. “My favorite thing to use is a really rare mold from Germany that makes a 32-inch-tall bunny that weighs eight pounds hollow. The bunny wears an apron and has a basket filled with sugar-flour chicks and with coconut that looks like Easter grass.” People don’t always eat those creations, she said.
“Somebody will come in a year later and tell me they didn’t eat something because it was too pretty to eat,” she said. “As long as the room temperature doesn’t fluctuate, chocolate creations will look good for years and years. It eventually loses its flavor, but never really changes the way it looks.”
Calico Chocolates offers a wide variety of handmade, customized chocolates, truffles, and molded confections in a variety of shapes, sizes, and flavors. The showcases also hold walnut caramel squares, pure chocolate cats, chocolate-covered toffee, peanut butter and chocolate tiger bark, rocky road chocolate-covered marshmallows with caramel and pecans, cashew patties, pecan patties, dark chocolate pecan patties, dark chocolate orange, s’mores, dark chocolate and peppermint, chocolate-covered cherries, chocolate-covered marshmallows, and Bailey’s Irish Crème, amaretto, mocha, and other flavored truffles, just to name a few.
The Godiva site on the Internet cites both the Aztecs and Mayans for their early use of chocolate. Aztec legend was that chocolate was brought from Paradise and that wisdom and power came from eating cocoa beans. Both groups made a cocoa drink called “xocolatl.”
Christopher Columbus brought cocoa beans back to Europe with him from his fourth voyage to the so-called New World.
For centuries in Europe, chocolate was mostly considered a beverage — predominantly for men — and was mixed with milk, wine, beer, sweeteners, or spices. Drinking chocolate was considered a very fashionable social event.
Eating chocolate was introduced in 1674 in the form of rolls and cakes served in the various chocolate emporiums.
Chocolate is now, oddly, considered both as a children’s treat — right? —and as a romantic inducement. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry.
“We have seen how chocolate progressed from a primitive drink and food of ancient Latin American tribes — a part of their religious, commerce, and social life — to a drink favored by the elite of European society and gradually improved until it was incomparably drinkable and, later, superbly edible,” said Norman Kolpas, who has written numerous books about cooking and food.
Cacao trees grow only in tropical climates — 20 degrees north or south of the equator. It takes nearly 400 beans to make a pound of chocolate liquor, the semi-liquid mass produced by grinding the beans and the (non-alcoholic) basis of all chocolate and cocoa products.
The “liquor” is fermented, dried, and shipped to the United States and other
chocolate-manufacturing countries where the concoction is cleaned and roasted
and eventually turned into the chocolate most of us recognize. Different
chocolate liquor ratios produce sweet, semisweet, and bittersweet chocolate. A
mixture of cocoa butter, chocolate liquor and other ingredients is finely ground
into a smooth paste. Then it is “conched,” or kneaded, often for days, to
develop its flavor and to produce its smooth texture. Following a tempering
period, the mixture is poured into molds, cooled, wrapped, and packaged for
shipment or for use as an ingredient in other products.
Is chocolate really an aphrodisiac? Well, maybe.
Researchers say chocolate contains three substances — caffeine, theobromine, and
phenyethylamine — that might be related to this notion. Caffeine acts as a
stimulant. Theobromine stimulates the heart muscle and the nervous system. And
phenyethylamine is reputed — no conclusive proof exists yet — to be a mood
elevator and an anti-depressant. The combination of these three substances
creates extra energy, makes hearts beat faster, and makes people a little jumpy
and slightly giddy.
The Aztec leader Montezuma is said to have drunk a frothy chocolate beverage
before going to visit any of his wives.
But before you go out to buy several cases of chocolate to ply your love
interest, researchers say, remember that these substances show up only in small
quantities in chocolate. So, is it really an aphrodisiac? Or is the stimulus
really in the generosity of sharing your chocolate hoard with someone you love?
