I like mint. I like chocolate. I don’t especially like the two together.
After some pondering, I think the reason is that mint has a cool taste and chocolate has a warm taste. They cancel each other out into a muddled sensation where neither flavor stands out.
I guess I’m just a purist for some foods. Although I like Mexican food and barbecue, I would never eat a Mexican pizza or a barbecue pizza. Nor would I eat an Italian taco, with meatballs and spaghetti sauce. Some restaurants think it’s cool to put hakusai – Napa cabbage to gaijins – on salmon or mahi-mahi burgers. Raw hakusai on a sammy is a bad idea. (You could grill it first.)
Barbara, my barber, keeps a tin of chocolates on her workstation, by the mirror on the counter. Clients can get a choco fix while getting clipped. Sometimes she has leftover Halloween candy, sometimes individually wrapped morsels like Reese’s or Hershey’s Kisses or miniatures, but most often it’s M&M’s – plain or peanut. Barb doesn’t care how much we eat. “That keeps me from eating all of them,” she says.
At my appointment last Saturday there were lots of large green M&M’s in the tin. I ate one, the first of several. The cool taste of mint, followed by chocolate, filled my head. Like Proust’s madeleine, it caused a flood of memories. (more…)