Eye Candy

Harlem is gentrifying like crazy. Crime is down, so the brownstones are going, going, gone, and craggy old warehouses are being converted into condos for yuppies as we speak. It is all so inevitable that lately even the crunchy, socially conscious, granola-eating, Subaru-driving community activist types on my block seem to have given up organising street rallies against gentrification.

For about a year there has been a Citarella on West 125th Street. In theory Citarella sells food, but it is the Vogue of supermarkets. The selection is fairly narrow and strictly based on looks, and only the beautiful need apply. Each and every item is visually perfect, a supermodel of sorts. Citarella seems to be aimed at people who like to have food on display in their homes but care little for the disgusting necessity of eating. The Harlem Citarella is surrounded by storefront churches, botánicas, fast food chains and a sea of public housing projects, yet somehow I doubt that an important local currency, food stamps and WIC cheques, is accepted inside.

Normally I do my weekly shopping at the boisterous, chaotic, mazelike Uptown Fairway a few blocks west. This weekend, however, I was briefly seduced by the pared-down, SoHo-style industrial chic of Citarella and by the absence of crowds. Of course I could find barely any of the mundane things I had jotted down on my shopping list, so I gave free rein to impulse buys. The cocoa powder of Scharffen Berger, a chocolate maker based in Berkeley, could not stay on the shelf, because its 1930s-style tin is simply to die for. (Antti, do you still ruin your kitchen decor with an O'boy container, the Nordic chocolate drink powder?)

Incredibly enough, I never had a single hot chocolate on my trip to Mexico in January. (How stupid am I? I drank lots of lousy tea instead.) In Puebla, though, even the salsas often had chocolate in them. I can't vouch for authenticity, but a bit of chilli gives this infantile drink a nice, adult edge, and the combination goes back to the Aztecs. If you would rather make your drink conquistador style, here is a more historic and involved recipe.

Just as incredibly, both Antti and I own a wooden tool made for the very purpose of frothing hot chocolate, a molinillo. We bought them at a gigantic Mexican supermarket in East LA on our trip together last summer. Apparently Mexicans are at least as obsessed with the froth on their chocolate as Italians are with the crema on their espresso. I read that the molinillo itself may well have come with the Spaniards, and that before it the froth was raised by pouring the chocolate from one pot into another from a height.

Two weeks ago, when I was still in Finland, somebody at work brought in Fazer's chilli chocolate. The chilli was not jarring or overpowering at all, just a subtle, barely perceptible accent, and I was hooked at once. Alas, I couldn't find it anywhere afterwards, not even in the airport duty-free. If anybody knows where to get it, please let me know so that I can ruin my diet.