Hot Chocolate

SPOTLIGHT

Chocolate goes very well with sex: before, during, after—it doesn't matter," says Helen Gurley Brown. And she should know, being one of the 50 million American women who will go weak at the knees on Valentine's Day. "Chocolate brings immeasurable joy, and some of us go to ridiculous ends to get it. My favorite thing is to bite into a hunk of frozen dark chocolate. I get five pounds of Sprungli every year from an old lover."

Chocolate is sin, love, and luxury rolled into three bite-size syllables. Heart-shaped boxes and erotic molds are ecstatic exclamations of its dark powers. "When I eat it I feel I should be lounging on satin sheets or in a bubble bath," says Baci-besotted Dianne Brill. And she should know. All these melt-inthe-mouth moments are just like falling in love: one theory holds that phenylethylamine, a natural ingredient in chocolate, simulates the hormonal effects of being in love.

Emperor Montezuma drank it as an aphrodisiac. And the conquistadores took it back to their ladies at the Spanish court in 1528, thus beginning the curious connection between the cacao bean and world power. The Sun King's France and Georgian England punctuated their respective climbs to glory with regular drafts of cocoa.

Now, in America's century, the U.S. spends over $4.25 billion on it annually, devouring about ten pounds of chocolate per person per year. If chocolate be the food of love, munch on. As the perennially youthful Claudette Colbert said when she confessed her lifelong habit, "I'd give my soul for a Tootsie Roll."

MIRA STOUT