I spotted the nondescript flip-over chalkboard placard first. It resembled so many I had seen outside New York restaurants advertising their menus, and most times, they faded into the sidewalk.
This one was a bit different, though, because printed on it was the word “Chocolat.” My friends and I had just left a chocolate café where two of us had tried the treats – a small layered mocha chocolate cake slice for me and a crumbly ill-shaped cranberry tart for her – and we were headed to our car. My friend Sandy had chosen a red box of Valentine chocolates for her husband.
The stop at the café had been preceded by a lackluster dance performance to the 1970s music of Sly and the Family Stone – Forgive them, Sly, for they knew not what they did with your music.
As we passed the sign, we were accosted by a man in a black overcoat and a white hat with the words “Chocolat Moderne” on the front. His wife was offering free samples of her chocolates on the ninth floor, the man – I later learned his name was Jim – told us.
With very little coaxing and with chocolate still on our minds, the four of us went upstairs to sample (and they were delicious). The shop had two glass countertop cases of chocolates. There were chocolates shaped like valentines and others made with ingredients that stretched my imagination: sea salt, olives, tomatoes, cardamom.
As my friends Kristin and Theresa bought bon bons to take home, I began reading the news stories about the chocolate maker, a banker turned chocolatier named Joan Coukos. One item stood out in the articles: She was compelled to make chocolates after coming across some molds in Belgium.
Now I was hooked even more. These metal containers had imbued Joan’s chocolates with a piece of history.
I have written before about chocolate molds. While visiting Bethlehem, PA, more than a year ago, I had come across a man who collected antique German chocolate molds, and used them to make Easter bunnies, Santas, Halloween and other figures from chalkware. My first introduction to the history of chocolate came in the form of a beautiful chocolate pot that I found at auction some years ago. The pot and cups were engraved with lovely pink flowers and the cups were so delicately thin that they were almost translucent.
Standing there in the Chocolat Moderne shop, I wanted to know more about Joan’s chocolate molds.
When she found the molds, she said, she was working at a major banking company in the midst of a merger and was sure that she would be laid off. A foodie, she knew she wanted to make something with her hands that she could sell, but wasn’t sure what.
On a vacation trip to Brussels, Belgium, in 2000, she was looking through a magazine on the plane and saw some high-end Belgian chocolates (“It sounded like (those) chocolates were a lot more exciting than what I’d had before,” she said). The country is known worldwide for its exquisite chocolates.
Out walking one day, she came upon the Sablon Antiques Market, an apparently famous weekend market in the city.
“It happened all by chance,” she said. “I was walking through an antiques market not looking for any antiques. … Suddenly, I saw a stall with a lady selling metal objects for cooking. As I got closer, I saw that they were molds. I didn’t know anything about making chocolates. I didn’t really know that chocolates were made in little molds like this. I asked the lady what they were and she said they were chocolate molds.
“A little bulb went off in my head.”
So she bought the molds and figured she’d teach herself how to make chocolates. She experimented, read books, Googled, took classes, and went to demonstrations and lectures. She was invited to a bon-bon making class by a chocolatier in France.
All the time, she was using her antique molds. She has about 10 of them (she picked up others on another trip to Brussels). Some are singles, and others are multiples. She believes that her duck mold (or a horse mold) is similar to one used in the 2000 movie “Chocolat,” which tells the story of a woman who opens a chocolate shop in a small French village.
At Joan’s shop, we searched her molds looking for a maker, and found the name Letang, along with an unclear inscription. I found by Googling that the first mold-making shop was founded in 1832 in Paris by Jean-Baptiste Letang. The unclear inscription was: “Letang Fils. 108 R. Vielle du Temple Paris France.”
Letang’s company supplied tin-plated molds to chocolate makers in the city and later sold them worldwide. Over the years, the company’s molds were recognized as among the best, and Letang received several distinguished awards. In 1877, it began publishing catalogs of its molds. In 1922, the company opened a store in Belgium, and it continues to make a variety of molds in France.
I found other vintage Letang molds on the web, include a saxophone player, a hen and some fish.
Joan opened her company in 2003 and went about it in an “artistic, non-methodical way,” she said. “I took a leap of faith.” She put her energies, she said, in her product and packaging, but not much into marketing, public relations and sales.
Along the way, though, she seemed to have gotten some good publicity: She was a guest on an Oprah show in February 2008 along with writer and lecturer Marianne Williamson and others talking about career-changing in midlife. She was featured in several newspaper and magazine articles, and made an appearance on the Al Roker show. The February issue of Oprah’s O magazine features her Valentine chocolates.
She creates what she calls “new” chocolate. It’s nothing like the plain old pecan/caramel turtles that I love, or the Ghirardelli and others we can buy just about anyplace. That’s the old chocolate.
New chocolate is high-quality and decorative. “It looks different and tastes different,” she said.
Creating them in those old quaint chocolate molds makes them even more special.
