Treat or Treat

Both Halloween and Thanksgiving are upon us, and so it is the time of year to give thanks, above all, that we are adults and can buy our own damn chocolate. I got to thinking this the other day, when I was busy mining the single American natural resource that will forever remain unexhausted: niggling childhood dissatisfactions.

For example, in my own hippie girlhood, refined sugar was strictly outlawed. This created a general atmosphere in which candy was regarded the same way British tabloids imagine Madonna and Guy Ritchie's relationship: What goes on in there? It must be heaven! Or, alternately, quite likely, hell! But anyway it is a completely restricted area and thus clearly holds the key to human happiness.

Of course, it being America in the 1970s, my brother and I still managed to get the stuff occasionally, by, for example, trading homemade macramé planters to Abbie Hoffman for Charleston Chews. By reciting bits of the Watergate tapes on street corners in exchange for Tootsie Rolls. Or, of course, by dressing in ways designed to convey support for renewable energy resources on Halloween. Oh, Halloween, when candy finally runs free, liberated from the oppressive rules of parents.

Yet every single solitary time we finally got hold of some sweet, sweet candy, adults--when they weren't telling you about the sugar-plantation-associated oppression of children in far-off lands--would try to put some kind of overarching philosophical frame on the experience. Appreciate it now, for you'll never be as carefree and happy as you are when you're a child with candy. Adult life is a vale of worry and tears. So you'd best enjoy this unpolluted innocence, because it's going downhill fast.

I believed this until three weeks ago!

When suddenly, it hit me: Wait a minute. Adults have nothing but unfettered, 365-day-a-year, 24-hour-a-day access to candy. And, more important, to chocolate. And much more important, to the really good stuff. While kids, kids are busy designing costumes so they can battle it out for 3 Musketeers bars! Suckers!

Sometimes I think we forget how good we have it because how good we have it is ubiquitous: Did you know that what is probably the most watched and celebrated artisan chocolate company in America right now is based in Minneapolis? And their chocolate and toffee is available right here, everywhere? In nearly every local Lunds, Byerly's, most of the co-ops, and most of the specialty food stores, like Turtle Bread and Surdyk's.

I am talking about B.T. McElrath, whom I first wrote about back in 1998, when the company was just two people. Just Brian McElrath, a former cook at places like the New French and Cocolezzone, working alone in a basement laboratory, and Brian's wife Christine, who worked there after working her other full-time job. Well, they worked and they worked and they worked, and then suddenly, last year, as they say, they blew up.

First, in the summer of 2001 they won the tippity-top prize at the show for the NASFT--the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, which everyone calls the Fancy Food show. This show is the most important thing that happens all year in gourmet foodstuffs. The first year they entered, Brian and Christine McElrath couldn't even afford to get a booth at the show, but they could afford the entry fee for the new-product contest, where their chocolates went head to head with 1,600 other entries. When they won, it was one of those industry-rocking, rookie-pitches-no-hitter moments that left everyone who knew about it amazed. They got on the cover of the trade show magazine, they got sales reps, they got employees who weren't obligated to show up by the whole till-death-do-us-part thing. Then, this summer, they went back to the show, and won the top prize for best confection. Now B.T. McElrath chocolates and toffees are placed in many of the most prestigious places that chocolates can be sold--in the chain Dean & DeLuca, in New York City's Zabar's, in Napa Valley's Oakville Grocery, in the West Coast coffee chain Tully's, in one of the Martha Stewart catalogs, on the pillows at the $800-a-night Salish Lodge in Washington (called the Great Northern Lodge in the television series Twin Peaks), and many other places. I think it's also safe to speculate that they're represented by the caseload in the research kitchens and focus groups of major chocolate companies. So when Cadbury launches its zinfandel-balsamic chocolate bar next year, you know where it came from.