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So, my lesson for the day was on a holy topic: chocolate. Having studied a great deal about food and folklore, including a great deal about chocolate, I felt not only qualified to teach about it, but also reverenced by the task. I was teaching my students a little about the history of chocolate, that blessed substance that originated with the Aztecs. I spent a half hour carefully building my oratory to an apex whereupon I planned to deliver an amazing fact, all to get a dramatic response, gasps, and perhaps a few tears. I said to them, "And, guess what the Aztecs used to flavor their chocolate? Not sugar, not milk, but. . .RED PEPPERS!" (silence). I could hear for the first time the florescent lights buzz above my head. They all just sat and stared at me like I had just revealed the driest, the dumbest fact that had ever entered their ears. Then it dawned on me: Why would they think that red peppers in chocolate was strange when they put red pepper PASTE in EVERYTHING that goes into their gullet. I think Koreans have even added an RP to the periodic table so as to explain red pepper paste as one of the necessary elements that constitutes the universe. The funny thing is that we can't go without it now--at least on our Korean dishes. We have become very used to taking certain things out of our meals that look prone to cause nausea, parasites, or death. In the beginning this included "the paste." But now, we find ourselves scooping less and less of it off into our kimchi bowls. "The paste" has earned an appendix into my personal mental library of food folklore. One More Chapter in the Food Folklore Archive--Scottro [2002-12-05]
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