12 November 2008
Paean to Chocolate Apples
There are no seasonal festivals celebrated in Finland after Midsummer, until Christmas. I have personally always addressed this oversight by having my birthday in September, and my two namedays in August and October, but until I encountered Samhain/Halloween I did not quite appreciate the need for one during the darkening half of the year.
Consider the Finnish festivals: Christmas, New Year, Easter, May Day, Midsummer. The lack of festivals in the later six months is so blatant that one is tempted to wonder whether something was forcibly removed at some point. An excellent candidate would be the ancient festival of Kekri, which is roughly equivalent to Samhain and which in the days of yore marked the beginning of the new year. It used to be the greatest festival of them all, even surpassing Christmas, but as I am writing this, I am led to wonder if it did not retain the old pagan beliefs and customs even more strongly than Christmas, which in Finland still only bears the bare vestiges of Christianity.
I discovered all this through, as you might guess, food. When I was growing up, I had not even heard of chocolate or toffee apples, or Halloween Brack, or Colcannon (which I associate with Samhain) or even carrot cake, which, while eminently edible throughout the year, really comes to its own when the weather turns cold and dark and even shadows hang soggy.
There is much I could say about the brack or colcannon or carrot cake, and about many others, too, but this time I want to focus on chocolate apples. Yes: specifically chocolate ones. I must, to my shame, even having waxed lyrical about the food of the dark months of the year, acknowledge that I have not to this date tried a toffee apple. But here is the problem: I intend, and I intend, and then I am faced by the terrible temptation that are chocolate apples, and once again I yield to the tart sweetness. It is rare that I can pass them by, although I too must admit that having had one a day for an entire week, I found the idea of skipping them considerably more tolerable than usually. Still, an apple a day…
Even though I never had chocolate apples as a child, I feel as though I did. They have bypassed all my neural circuits and transcended my memories. Every year, when I first sink my teeth into a chocolate apple, when the hard shell cracks and the sour juice bursts through it, flows across my lips and drips down my chin, I am utterly convinced that I am reliving the equivalent moments of childhood in some alternate reality.
I haven’t yet tried to make chocolate apples myself, but perhaps they are a project for some stormy evening, with bright candles burning, when the incoming winter howls outside.