Whenever one thinks about Valentine’s Day, images of strawberries and chocolate at once cross one’s mind. These two items, apart from red roses, are central to the annual celebration of love.
Strawberries have been associated with love since antiquity. In Ancient Rome, the heart-shaped red berries (which, incidentally, are not classified as berries and are related to roses, another expression of love!) were linked with Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity and victory. Legend has it that when two people split a strawberry, they’ll fall in love. To quote an old saying, “roses are red, violets are blue, strawberries show love is true.”
The very reason why a strawberry is not considered a berry – because its seeds are outside on the skin of the fruit – makes it a symbol of fertility, which is exactly what Valentine’s Day celebrates. Love and fertility, after all, are inextricably linked. In western literature, however, strawberries have been associated with beautiful and unfaithful women, or any dangerous pleasure, with the imagery of the snake lurking in a bed of strawberries dating back to the Roman poet Virgil.
Poets and playwrights (Shakespeare included) may not have given strawberries a good image, but in the popular imagination, red roses, strawberries and chocolate are synonymous with love. The idea of combining strawberries with chocolate, though, is as current as the 1960s, when Lorraine Lorusso of the Stop ’N’ Shop in Chicago created the iconic dessert of strawberries quilted in chocolate (bitter-sweet, milk or white!) and it became an instant hit. So much so that it now appears on menus all over the world!
The much-loved dessert appears to have been a creation of convenience. As Carly Westerfield warns us in ‘Bon Appetit’, strawberries – almost any berries for that matter – “are a terrible thing to spend your money on in the chilly, slushy month of February”. And she goes on to add: “Strawberries are in season for only a handful of weeks, none of which overlap with Valentine’s Day in the US.”
Pumping up strawberries with lashings of chocolate therefore was a nifty idea. It helps that the mild flavours of strawberries seem to be just right for chocolate. And though it may be a coincidence, strawberries and chocolates are both widely regarded as aphrodisiacs.
Just like chocolate dipped strawberries are a recent invention, the idea that romantic feelings are best expressed with chocolates is also not that old – in fact, it can be traced back to Richard Cadbury, the Englishman who gave the world its most loved chocolate brand. In a stroke of marketing genius, Cadbury linked romance and chocolate forever when on Valentine’s Day in 1868 he introduced heart-shaped chocolate boxes.
The ‘fancy box’, as Cadbury called it, could be used to store keepsakes such as love notes, giving the packaging a selling point beyond its original use, writes Casey Barber in CNN.com, quoting food studies scholar Charles Feldman. The idea of the heart-shaped box took off and “the marketing machine took over,” according to Feldman. Chocolate companies began producing boxes in an ever-increasing variety of styles to attract customers.
The idea travelled across the Atlantic to the United States, where by the 1930s, chocolates and Valentine’s Day became synonymous. Whitman’s, one of the largest and oldest brands of boxed chocolates, the CNN.com article informs us, coined the line, “A woman never forgets the man who remembers.” It reinforced the popular belief in the importance of chocolate in romantic rituals, making Valentine’s Day one of the biggest marketing opportunities for the chocolate industry.
At We The Chefs, we love Valentine’s Day because it is an occasion for us to showcase what our home chefs can do to amp up the romantic quotient this season. Chocolates and strawberries both feature in our Valentine’s Day offerings, but like everything we do at We The Chefs, these come with our special touches.
For the diehard romantics who are getting ready for Valentine’s Day, our home baker Namrata Kohli has prepared sets of four dark rum-infused boozy brownies with toasted walnuts to add some crunch to the texture and these come with chocolate-draped Mahabaleshwar strawberries on the side. So, you’ll get all the ingredients necessary for your personal celebration of love from We The Chefs – like always, we believe in making life easy for you. All you’ll have to do now is order the best red roses from your preferred florist!
Click here to order chocolate dipped strawberries and boozy brownies from Chef Namrata
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