A couple of years ago, I was walking in the streets of Edinburgh when I chanced upon the Chocolate Soup, at 2 Hunter Square, near the Bridge. It was evening, and I had a couple hours to spare before meeting some mates at The Three Sisters – a popular nightspot for the student crowd (who colloquially refer to it as The Six Tits). Enticed at the novelty of a chocolate cafe, I excitedly plonked myself down at a corner table and curiously digested the menu. It was unbelievable – a real mecca for chocolate lovers with all sorts of chocolatey delights on offer.

You know the feeling when you go into a really posh gourmet haute cuisine fine dining restaurant, where you more likely than not are presented a menu writ in a language completely foreign to you even though it is your main lingua franca? That’s exactly how it was, looking at the menu at the Chocolate Soup.

Now experience has told me that in a good restaurant, when faced with a predicament as above, it is usually a wise idea to trust your server for recommendations – which I did. Several minutes later, I was presented with a steaming cup of the richest looking chocolate ever, as well as a small but artfully crafted slice of pastry to go with it.

It was the most fabulously fantastic chocolate experience I’ve ever had. Mind you, I was up till then an amateur when it comes to all things chocolate, believing that the Mars bar (especially the fried variety) was the pinnacle of chocolatedom, and that Hot Chocolate referred to powdered chocolate drink sachets reconstituted with Hot Water, and maybe topped with some badly manufactured marshmallow bits and whipped cream out of a can. So you can imagine the ecstasy that enveloped my entire being and psyche as I indulged in the chocolate manna – rich, silky, beautifully bitter and perfectly prepared.

I’ve never had a chocolate chaud as good as that ever since.

Which is why I decided to try out Jeffrey Steingarten’s Chocolate Chaud recipe, which in itself is an adaptation of acclaimed French Pastry Chef Pierre Herme’s creation.

The recipe is simple enough:

550ml whole milk
50ml bottled still water
60g caster sugar
1,100g bar dark bittersweet chocolate, Scharffen Berger, Valrhona, or Lindt (see note, below), finely sliced with a serrated bread knife
28g cocoa powder, loosely packed, preferably Valrhona

In a 2 litre saucepan, stir together the milk, water, and sugar. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Add the chopped chocolate and the cocoa and bring to a boil again, whisking until the chocolate and cocoa are dissolved and the mixture has thickened. Reduce the heat to very low.

Blend for 5 minutes with a wand mixer or whirl the hot chocolate in a standard blender for half a minute, until thick and foamy.

Yield: Four (175ml) cups of hot chocolate.

Note: I use a dark chocolate containing close to 70 percent cocoa, though Lindt bittersweet also works just fine. The Mayans and the Aztecs considered the froth the best part. Today, five minutes with an immersion mixer or a blender accomplishes what a half hour of beating did long ago.

- Jeffrey Steingarten, “It Must’ve Been Something I Ate“

In New Zealand, Whittaker’s makes a pretty decent – though by no means outstanding – chocolate bar that’s 72% bittersweet chocolate, of Ghanaian cocoa beans. I’ve had lots of experience working and tasting Valrhona chocolate – which to me is undoubtedly one of the finest chocolate produced today – during my brief stint as a Pastry Commis Chef (oh the wonderful memories), so I decided to give Whittaker’s a go. After all, compared with Cadbury’s Old Gold, Whittaker is like a Porsche next to a beat up Proton.

As with all pastry recipes, measurements should be as precise as possible, though as scientific as one tries to be, one can’t help but think that in the end, its the artistry that matters most. I made a half batch of the recipe above, which turned out beautiful! Silky, strong, rich, velvety (which is a horrid descriptor of food as far as I concerned – have you ever tasted velvet?), albeit a little sweet – which I attribute to whittaker’s chocolate bar which is somewhat sweeter than say a Valrhona equivalent. The only problem was that I could not get it to be much frothy, no matter how much I whizzed it in my low-quality home blender. But no matter. It was still gorgeously tasty and sinfully satisfying.

Half an hour later and I’m still in ecstasy. It now occurs to me that the quality of the chosen chocolate really is tantamount. The preparation is simple, but just like great Italian food – the ingredients must be of quality. But as great as it was, it left me feeling a little queasy due to the richness, and most probably the sweetness of the Whittaker bar. The next time I make it, I think I’ll add a little chilli powder, to balance the richness of the chaud. And I think perhaps a pinch of salt might do wonders for it too – as salt according to some helps bring out the flavour of chocolate more, not unlike vanillin, though many others would say it is absolutely toss.

Come to think of it, this chaud I had is not too unlike a woman. It’s brilliant to have and a marvellous experience, but if a little unbalanced can leave you feeling a little worse for wear.

I’ll admit it. I am a self-professed foodie, a shameless gastronome, an amateur epicure. At times I fancy myself to be the next Jeffrey Steingarten or Steven A. Shaw, two (of many) prominent lawyer turned food critics. It must be amazing to be paid to write about foods you’ve been paid to eat, not to mention the places you have to go to eat the food, and the people you meet along the way, including those who cook your food. It’s a hobo’s wet dream. Okay, you’d have to be a pretty literate hobo with a decently discerning palette, but still… Come on. How many other careers can provide you with such a sensually satisfying job description?

As a Malaysian, I had the good fortune of growing up in a country that lives to eat, not eats to live. To say that food in Malaysia is smorgasbord-like is to say that India is made up of a fair few Indians. In Kuala Lumpur, my city, if your desired gustatory delight has a name, you’d be sure to find it. Heck, even if it doesn’t have a name, you’d find it. But quality is not necessarily a focus of Malaysian eating habits. Maggi, in particular has an obscene amount of consumers – mostly starving students, fresh law graduates and performing arts practitioners. Okay, that may be a generalisation based on someone I know fairly well, but you get the point.

Thus I must admit that my obsessive interest in food is a fairly recent development, the consequence of a chance employment at the only five-star hotel in Cardiff, Wales, as a Commis Chef. But don’t get me wrong. I’ve always loved food. The only difference is that before all I cared about was eating it, but nowadays I am genuinely and passionately predisposed to learning about it, where it comes from, how it is prepared, the chemistry and science behind it, as well as the artistry that goes into it. If ever opportunities arise to sample anything new, exotic, or weird, you can be sure that I would instantaneously morph into the guy who was first in line for the Star Wars Episode I premiere three days away, complete with camping bag and plentiful supply of Maggi noodles Russian Caviar and Fennel Sour Cream Blinis, eagerly looking forward to experience the Holy Grill. Just like the Kiwano.

Imagine my delight and irrational hyper-excitement as I was walking in the local supermarket looking for a cucumber to go into my raita for the night’s Indian-themed dinner feast when I chanced upon a funky, spiky fruit in bright orange with beautiful yellow fractal-like swirls all over. There was no item description to be found, but on the humble but visually all-so-attractive food was a small oval sticker with the words “N.Z. Kiwano horned melon” printed on it.

The horned melon, cucumis metuliferus, also called Melano, African horned cucumber or melon, jelly melon, hedged gourd, English tomato, or Kiwano, is a vine of the cucurbitaceae (gourd) family. African in origin, once native only to the region of the Kalahari desert, but is today grown in California and New Zealand, it is cultivated for its fruit, which looks like an oval melon with horns: 2 to 4 inches long, light green until maturity when it turns gorgeous orange, having distinctive, long, sharp spikes on their exterior.

The fruit, which is highly decorative and thus is sold mostly as a garnish, tastes like a mix of cucumber, lemon, lime and banana. The yellow-green flesh has a gelatinous consistency, and contains whitish seeds similar to those of a cucumber. To an extent, it looks like a mutated hippie kiwifruit, which probably explains the name Kiwano, which is trademarked by Prinut Inc. – blatantly another fruit branding scheme, not unlike Zespri for Kiwifruits, Sunkist for Oranges or Grapple for Grape Flavoured Apples (“Looks like an apple, tastes like a grape!”).

It’s pretty nutritious too, fat-free with 25 calories per 100g serving and 40% Vitamin C – even if it doesn’t taste much good and apparently contains a bitter non-volatile compound that is toxic to mammals, according to the factSHEET by Aliza Benzioni at Purdue University. I must admit I got just a wee bit worried at the fact that its considered a toxic food-substance, but me being me just went “Oh, what the hell. I’ll be damned if a Kiwano kills me, and not those Marlboros, or the random drunk crazy Asian boy-racer hit-and-run specialist.”

Eating it was a gastronomic experience – not a very tasty one, what with it being mildly “toxic” – but an experience nonetheless. Perhaps I’m inflicted with the “gourmand syndrome”, described by Swiss Medical Specialists Regard and Landis as a “benign eating disorder associated with lesions involving parts of the right anterior cerebral hemisphere… a preoccupation with food and a preference for fine eating.”

I don’t think I’d be running back to the supermarket to buy another Horny Melon though, unless I’m catering for some fancy event featuring an ‘exotic’ fruit platter – and even then, I’d probably craftily use it as a garnish tantalisingly presented to fool the poor unsuspecting guests…

Now where’s that gosh-darned Grapple gone? I feel a pang of grape-flavoured apple cravings coming forth…

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For more information and pictures of the Kiwano, see further:

-> Cooking For Engineers – Off Topic: African Horned Melon or Kiwano

-> Obsess.com – Fruit Reviews – Kiwano Horned Melon