resonant | Slash glasses

This morning at the gym I was reading a Bill Buford New Yorker article about chocolate. (I don't know how I'd ever keep up with the New Yorker if I couldn't read it on the elliptical machine.) Buford interviews chocolatier Frederick Schilling, and Schilling takes him to Bahia to meet cacao farmer Diego Badaró.

Cast of characters: Schilling comes across as feverishly intense and kind of a nutcase; Badaró never uses a full sentence when one word will do, drives scary fast, and gives me a sort of Ronon vibe. Schilling's not bad looking, in a semi-shaven slacker sort of way, and Badaró is flat-out hot. (You can see a not-great photo of them here; the one in the issue was more of a close-up.) I have no idea what Buford looks like, which is probably a mercy.

Anyhow, the more time we spend on the cacao plantation, the more personal and physical the prose gets. (This may be because Buford is doing stuff like chewing toxic wild tobacco leaves and eating cacao beans in large quantities while Badaró says, "It will make you alert," and I'm picturing him smirking the way Ronon does when the crazy Milky Way people put things in their mouths without asking questions about them.)

So now they're in the place where the cacao beans are fermented to get the essence of chocolate out of them.

Inside, the room was shadowy and hot. The smells multiplied instantly, a sudden olfactory cargo: a brewery, but also a winery, a vinegar factory, a dairy. ... There was a gas, mildly disconcerting. It singed the lungs but felt strangely pleasant.

Schilling inhaled. "Aaah, get those acetic acids up your nose."

One trough was full. The beans, about chest-high, were covered with banana leaves, a gently heaving green blanket, wrapped tight, an oven on high. The yeast plus sugar produced carbon dioxide, plus heat and alcohol. ...

They were in their third day of fermentation, and were now purply, the sweet pulp almost entirely gone, though still gooey. ...

The full trough was separated from other empty ones by wooden slats. Badaró removed one so that he could shovel beans into the next space. No matter how tightly everything was wrapped, the beans on top were cooler than the ones on the bottom. By shoveling everything next door, Badaró was turning them over. Normally, Jardin [the elderly manager of the processing] would then hop inside, shuffling beans under his boots, poking a toe into corners, to ensure that every bean was equally fermented. ...

Badaró, meanwhile, was trying to fix the thermostat. He wanted to keep the temperature from exceeding a hundred and twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but he had no way of measuring it. The beans in the trough seemed hotter than that. I stared at them, trying to gauge how hot they might be, and then I did a thing that seemed strange at the time but was really just a misunderstanding. I took off my shirt, shoes, and pants, and, with my boxers on, I swung myself over the side and sank into the beans. They really were very hot.

I had wanted to get a sense of what you went through to complete cacao's strange fermentation, and had assumed that most people wouldn't be wearing many clothes. Jardin stared at me with a look of apparent horror.

Then Schilling removed his clothes, slipped into the beans, and was jubilant. "Yoni juice," he said. "Yoni of cacao juice." He filled his hands with beans, looked up, and poured them down on his face.

Badaró then removed his clothes. He landed with an awkward splash. Three of us were in a trough that might comfortably accommodate an adult pig, and the fermenting cacao was up to our necks. Badaró had taken to invoking some god, humming in his deep voice. "We must immerse ourselves and connect to the Aztec gods," he said. He disappeared, sinking below the surface. When he reemerged, he was covered in goop: beans behind his ears, stuck to his eyelids, clinging to his hair.

And then we get a bit of white space, a drop cap, and a paragraph that begins, "When Schilling and Holderman returned to Boulder from their first Fancy Food Show, in the summer of 2001 ..."

But you and I, readers, know what happened in between.

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libitina

I might have a wee bit of a crush on Bill Buford, but it never occurred to me to look for the rest of his writings. Thank you so much for pointing this out!

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