Muesli Lover?enjoyed a history, interiors and cookery lesson this week as?a guest of the venerable food writer Claudia Roden in her extraordinary arts and crafts home in London. The interior was straight out of the pages of her new book, The Food of Spain, a Spanish-Moorish feast of tiles, heavy cushions and dark, long-loved wooden furniture.
Claudia invited a group of journalists and bloggers to try some of the dishes from her book and the one that grabbed me was the hot chocolate. Our saccharine, watery versions just don't compare to the stand-your-spoon-in-it Spanish chocolate, thickened with cornflour, delicately sweetened and served with churros.
Chocolate was drunk long before it was eaten and its origins are in Mexico. Once solid chocolate began being used for cake baking,?Basques and Catalans found their source from Jewish chocolatiers in southern France, so Claudia explained, as she held court in her sunny back garden.
The drinking of chocolate, although limited to the wealthy, was encouraged by the Pope as nutritional sustenance during Lent, ironic then that many now celebrate abstinence during Lent with a chocolate fest at Easter.
The four-ingredient thick hot chocolate drink recipe features in 512-page tome, The Food of Spain, as much a coffee table book as a cookbook, and featuring some alternative?breakfast dishes if chocolate sounds a little too bourgeois. The tortilla, creamy salt cod omelette and scrambled egg with asparagus and prawn stand out but there are more, depending on how adventurous your morning tastebuds are.
Food of Spain (Michael Joseph/Penguin hardback, ?25)
Source: http://www.mueslilover.com/2012/03/claudia-rodens-chocolate-breakfast.html
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