Drinking chocolate

In time honoured fashion I used to start every English teaching session with questions. You know the sort of thing. What have you done this weekend?, What did you have for breakfast? As an answer to the second question I was surprised how many youngsters told me that, if they had anything and most didn't, they had milk. Then I realised that, when they said milk, they meant chocolate flavoured milk. Nesquik for instance.

A Spanish tradition is chocolate with churros. We Brits usually describe churros as being like doughnuts except that they are made with a different dough and have a different taste but it's close enough. It's a typical breakfast in lots of Spain, a popular treat and it's a particular favourite on Sunday mornings. It's also one of those things that young people do at five or six in the morning after a night on the town. The churros are nearly always served with a thick, sugary, chocolate drink.

We have an Industrial Estate in Pinoso. It's like thousands of Industrial Estates all over Spain and probably the world. Metal box buildings, fork lifts playing dodgems, articulated lorries manoeuvring and workers having a crafty fag by the loading bays. A few months ago, next to the dispossessed Ford Agent, a delicatessen type shop opened up. It has a good selection of local and not so local wine, nuts,  overpriced cans of gourmet seafood, pink salt, honey from lavender fed bees and.. - you get the idea. I didn't think it had a chance of surviving mainly because of its strange location but it's still there a year or so later and we've become irregular but repeat customers.

The deli has a remaindered and rummage section and in it was a bar of chocolate that caught my eye. I thought the wrapper was impressive. The wrapper is the photo for this post. It shows one of the big wooden carvings of the Virgin Mary. Nearly every city, town and village in Spain has a Virgin in its armoury of statues to be paraded through the street for one celebration or another and nearly all of the Marys are dressed in an impressively embroidered cape often valued at thousands of euros. This one is the Virgin of the Forsaken. The statues always make me think Exodus 20:4-5, you know the one, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

The chocolate we bought, with the Virgin wrapper, is to make the drink to go with the churros. The instructions say to melt 80g of chocolate in 250 ml of milk. As you might imagine that produces quite a thick drink.

So, if you talk to a Spaniard about drinking chocolate they are thinking about something with the consistency of custard or tomato ketchup whilst if you talk to a Briton about drinking chocolate we are thinking about the bedtime "cocoa", maybe that breakfast Nesquik or the stuff you've decided to buy from the vending machine at the swimming baths because you're not going to drink that disgusting swill they call tea again.

Just saying.

18 grammes of sweetness

One of those things you "have to do" when you're a visitor to Spain is to try chocolate y churros - a hot fried sweet dough stick served with a hot chocolate drink. The hot chocolate is basically melted chocolate thinned out with milk. I just checked and the Valor version, for instance, has nearly 40% chocolate along with sugar, rice flour and milk powder. So Spaniards expect drinking chocolate to be spoon standingly thick.

We Britons drink cocoa or hot chocolate too. I seem to remember that, when I was a lad, I had to be precise about the name or I got real cocoa which was much darker and bitterer than the Cadbury's drinking chocolate I preferred. I may well be wrong but I think that cocoa solids is the name for the powder left after cocoa butter has been extracted from cocoa beans and that the cocoa solids dissolved in milk were the traditional British bedtime drink of cocoa. Somewhere between the 1950s and 70s cocoa was slowly ousted by a sweeter, thicker chocolately drink, drinking chocolate, which was much easier to prepare.

Spaniards drink something very much like British drinking chocolate (I suppose thinking of Cadbury as British now that it is owned by Montelez is like saying Nessels instead of Nestley for Nestlé and pretending they're not Swiss - but you know what I mean) with the main brands being Cola Cao and Nesquik. As much as anything these chocolatey flavoured powders are drunk, both hot and cold, by children at breakfast time. Unlike the thicker liquid chocolate that goes with churros Cola Cao and Nesquik are not a favourite tipple among Spanish adults.

It's surprising how difficult this makes the conversation with my Spanish learners of English when we're talking about what they might drink as a warming beverage in a London café.

The individual packs of Cola Cao contain 18 grammes by the way.