February 15–22, 1996

food

Take Carob Yourself

If you can find the stuff, that is — the popular chocolate substitute is getting hard to find.

By Janet Ruth Falon

Nobody gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolate for Valentine's Day yesterday.

Then again, I don't think a beloved has ever given me bonbons on February 14 — this despite the fact that chocolate, a known mood enhancer, is considered by some to be an aphrodisiac (to bank on these benefits, Montezuma, king of the Aztecs, supposedly drank 50 unsweetened cups of cocoa daily).

No, it was my hearts-in-the-right-place parents who used to send me Valentines chocolates, even into my 30s, and especially during the Februarys when I wasn't in a relationship, just so I'd feel loved.

But you have to understand that chocolate — pronounced the New York "chawklit," thank you very much — was always a prize, reward, temptation and mock-guilty pleasure in my household of origin, and we didn't need the fancy stuff like Godiva. Our classic family story is that my mother, while recuperating in the hospital after giving birth to my brother, devoured an entire five-pound box of chocolate-covered marshmallows that my Aunt Bernice had brought, as requested by my mother, as a post-partum gift — before Aunt Bernice left the room.

And maybe it was an etiquette of an earlier, less nutritionally-enlightened era, or a protocol of my particular socio-economic slice, but a colleague of my father's would always send us an enormous box of mixed chocolates — Barton's or Barricini, which would be analogous to Whitman's or Russell Stover — as a holiday gift. Like many other people, I later learned, I used to fantasize about biting into each one, putting back the half-eaten pieces that didn't interest me; finding the solid chocolate pieces was like hitting pay dirt.

It was only coincidental that I married a man whose mother, a recovered hard-core chocoholic, used to reward herself with a couple of miniature O'Henrys or Snickers after an on-hands-and-knees scrub-the-kitchen-floor session. We recently bought her a fancy silk scarf imprinted with drawings of chocolate bars for her birthday, just to remind her of her pre-disciplined days.

Not surprisingly, my parents and in-laws get along just fine.

After many years of eating fairly healthfully, I realized I hadn't dealt with my congenital taste for chocolate. I didn't know the facts that I know now, thanks in great part to my bedside copy of Prevention Magazine's Nutrition Advisor, that more than half the calories in chocolate are from fat, much of which is saturated. That chocolate is a common allergen, and people susceptible to canker sores or migraine headaches should avoid it. That chocolate has enough caffeine in it so that, if I'm already hopped up, it makes me even jumpier.

So I started to cut back a bit. Most notably, I stopped buying bags of Reese's peanut butter cups, hoping we'd have a rainy Halloween and I'd be stuck with the leftovers, and instead handed out little boxes of raisins, which I usually am stuck with because, I think, the neighborhood kids spread the word about boring eats and thus bypass our house. (My mother-in-law, interestingly, doesn't approve, and thinks we should hand out what the kids want — some projection going on here, maybe?)

And when I needed a fix, which in the past would only have been satisfied with some fistfuls of M? or Hershey's Kisses, I would head to the health-food store and buy a carob candy bar (my husband, you-know-who's son, describes the taste of carob as "something you'd scrape off the bottom of a pot" — but frankly, I don't hold much by the culinary preferences of someone who like radishes). Carob candy looked a lot like chocolate, and it sort of reminded me of chocolate in that it was brown and sweet and often studded with recognizable companions such as nuts or raisins; okay, it never quite did the trick, but the hole it left in satisfaction I filled in with feeling virtuous.

(Speaking of questionable virtuosity, my Nutrition Advisor says that some people believe that during John the Baptist's fast in the desert, the "locusts" he ate were actually carob-tree pods, which contain a sweet pulp that is 50 percent sugar.)

So imagine my distress when I went to buy myself a pre-Valentine's Day carob bar last week, and I couldn't find one. I called Chocolate by Mueller in the Reading Terminal Market — a dangerous destination for anyone with my upbringing — but they didn't stock any, and couldn't direct me to a source. I called Fannie May, but nothing. I called Godiva, just for the hell of it, and I'll bet they laughed at me once I hung up. I called Stutz and Asher's and Zipf's, but zip. Nada. To borrow a line from Pete Seeger, where has all the carob gone?

Even my neighborhood health-food store was dry, although the owner offered to do a special-order for me. They did have loose bins containing carob-covered raisins and carob-covered peanuts, which I tried, but they were sort of dry and crusty and slightly bitter, and yogurt malt balls, which I liked a lot, probably because they weren't masquerading as chocolate.

They also had a variety of "appropriate" chocolate bars from companies such as Wild Nuts and Tropical Source, both of which make dairy-free chocolate bars that contain but don't taste like tofu, and part of the purchase price is donated to a do-gooding organization; and Chatfield's, with its popular malt-sweetened dairy-free truffle; and Newman's Own Organics (even the wrapper is politically correct, in the best sense of the phrase, printed in soy ink); and the Swiss-made Rapunzel, which lets down its hair and proselytizes about its eco-trade program inside the wrapper — but there were no carob bars per se.

Even my local Fresh Fields couldn't deliver; a spokesperson said they don't carry carob bars because a lot contain hydrogenated oils, a healthful eater's nemesis.

At this point, I had built up such a craving in my mind that there was only one solution: Give up on my search for carob and give in to a bowl of Ben and Jerry's "Chubby Hubby." I haven't dealt with my congenital passion for ice cream yet.

Something to chew on: Co-op America's National Green Pages is a directory of socially and environmental products and services, including food co-ops, stores, restaurants and products. It costs $5.95 and can be ordered by calling 1-800-58-GREEN.