Hot Chocolate Comforts In More Ways Than One


February 28, 1999|by DOROTHY GULBENKIAN BLANEY (A free-lance story for The Morning Call).

Whether we're chewing on gingko leaves or running rapidly through the alphabet to locate a lost name in our minds, most of us have problems with memory. It's not that we can't remember things. Rather, it's often that what we remember we'd rather forget, and what's lost in our mind is a necessary piece of information, like where we left the car or our glasses.

More important than the inconvenience associated with these lapses is the loss of wonderful parts of our past that we're not even aware of because they are buried under layers of lists and loads of less pleasant but much more clearly remembered experiences.

How do we recover those joyful moments from childhood like the sweetness of hot chocolate after sledding on a winter's afternoon and the tenderness of a mother's love?

Marcel Proust, that famous French giant of literature at the beginning of the century, triggered seven volumes of recollections from the taste of a few crumbs of cake in a spoonful of tea. I still remember my excitement at the discovery of the special way his past was unlocked for him.

We had the habit in my family of reading aloud. In the summer, when I was growing up, we'd take our places on the porch, looking out over the garden, my sister and I on the glider at the end, and my parents and my grandfather, when he was with us, in the big, green Adirondack chairs. While we all took turns reading the long books, or parts in Shakespeare or Shaw plays, sometimes only my father read. That's how I was introduced to Proust and the power of our senses to evoke memories.

It was a mid-summer's night and I had come in very reluctantly when my mother called, much preferring the company of chums and the fireflies we'd captured in glass jars, to my family's. Perhaps because he knew my imagination was not on Act II of "Two Gentlemen of Verona," the reading of the last evening, my father suggested he begin the first chapter of "Swann's Way," a book I'd seen on the shelf but never taken down.

From the first sentence about the child going to bed early, I was drawn into the story. That night, unlike the boy in the book, we stayed up late, listening to the lyrical, long introduction to Proust's masterpiece, "Remembrance of Things Past."

Toward the end of that chapter, there's a passage that describes the process he experienced, eating the "petite madeleine" and remembering his Sunday tea with his Aunt Leonie and life in Combray:


From the evening on the porch when I heard of that experience, I longed to have it happen to me. Nonetheless, I was taken by surprise when, after 50 years, something like it occurred a few months ago.

I was sitting late in the afternoon last November, waiting for my husband, Joseph, in the salon of the Lutetia Hotel in Paris. I'd come in early because it was very cold in the street. It would be at least an hour before Joseph arrived from the airport. Someone started to play some American jazz on the piano. I had a book, but little interest in opening it. My fingers were still numb because I'd gone out without gloves. The waiter caught my eye and, with the prescience typical of the French, suggested a hot chocolate. I agreed. In about 15 minutes _ he had to go down to the kitchen rather than back to the bar _ he reappeared with a tray holding two pots, a cup, a spoon and two wrapped cubes of sugar. The ceremony began. First, he poured dark chocolate from the smaller pot halfway up the cup. Then hot milk from the second pot. I stirred and added one cube of sugar, dissolving it with the help of the spoon. I lifted the cup and, viola!

I was 7 years old, back on Denmark Road, sitting at the round, marble-top table by the window in the dining room. I smelled the chocolate from the pot on the stove, the one that was always burned on the bottom, I felt my fingers tingle and smart, still damp from the wet mittens I'd been wearing out in the snow. My mother was across from me, offering more chocolate and scolding me gently for staying out so long. The sense of being safe, of being cared for, of being home, filled me as surely as the chocolate. When Joseph arrived a little later he wondered at the delight on my face. I tried to take him back to the winter afternoon with my mother in the house in Plainfield. But, despite my best attempt to detail that day long ago, I was unable to convey the sensation, the feeling of the first taste of chocolate on my tongue, not just from the cup at the Lutetia, but from the cup of my childhood, which somehow flowed into it.

So now, if you see me popping gingko pills, with hot chocolate, you'll understand it's not because I'm trying to locate my glasses or keys. Rather, I'm hoping to warm myself again with the remembrance of being 7 and seated with my mother, looking out at a winter garden.

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