One little-known fact about me is that I am not a chocolate lover. My dislike of chocolate stems from the fact that it makes me ill when I eat quantities of it larger than, say, a few milk chocolate chips. Many people are completely horrified by the fact that I don't like chocolate, but if a food made you sick (as in, nauseated, sweaty, and headachey — this is how I feel when I eat more than a tiny amount of chocolate), you wouldn't like it either. Perhaps the more unforgivable thing (at least, for those who do love chocolate) is that I don't regret my chocolate aversion at all. I figure the fact that I don't like and have no desire to eat chocolate simply means I can eat more other stuff that I do like. For example: ice cream (unless it's chocolate).
Tremontaine, of course, involves quite a lot of chocolate. Many readers, as well as every other writer involved in this
serial, enjoy the chocolatey goodness because they enjoy eating chocolate in real life. I, on the other hand, could care less about the taste of it, but the trade of it I find very interesting. You see, I was an economics major as an undergraduate, and I did my first master's degree on Chinese food. The intersection of chocolate (food) and Kaab's family's trade in it (economics) gave me a lot of fun things to consider.
This brings us to episode 8, "A City Without Chocolate," which is All About Chocolate ... and Something Else, Too. When we (the writers) blocked out the season, we decided that a particular romantic connection was going to be made in this episode, and I was determined to be the writer who made that connection. (Anyone who has read my books will understand why. If you haven't read my books, they're about queer women.) During the course of writing this episode, I ended up researching tariffs (more interesting than you think!), the history of chocolate (globalization!), and the specific ways that chocolate was prepared in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (probably not the way you imagine). All of that research informed what happens in episode 8, especially one very important scene between two women.
The funniest thing about writing this episode, for me, was that because I disliked chocolate, I wasn't entirely sure how to describe its taste. One day I ended up asking my wife, who does like chocolate (especially dark chocolate), why she enjoys it. She seemed as dumbfounded by my question as I'm sure many of you are, but she did manage to explain to me that one of the reasons she likes chocolate is because it tastes so rich. Rich was not a word I would ever have used to describe chocolate, but when she said that word, I understood what she meant. The richness of chocolate — not only its flavor but the wealth it brings into the traders' pocks — is a key element of Tremontaine, and I hope you find this episode as rich as the taste of chocolate itself.
(I still don't eat it, though.)
