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hazelchazPart 2 of 4
As will come as no surprise to anyone who's traveled First Class on a train before, First Class means they feed you. So right after we got underway, they came around offering up coffee and tea. I got a cup of tea, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
library_lynn asked for a tea with milk; not because she wants tea, it was for me so I could try it both ways. She got a cold bottle of still water, (We've noticed that servers look at us funny when she tries to order water -- tap water -- with her meals, so we're probably going to order her bottled water more of the time when wwe dine out.) Then they took our breakfast orders. I asked for a sausage roll, Lynn ordered the fruit plate. (A sausage roll is just a sandwich where they take link sausages, slice them lengthwise, and serve them on a bun.) And they brought around orange juice. And a basket full of croissants and toast. (Cold toasted bread; that's how they do it here.) And they keep bringing more tea and coffee round... I decided I like the milky tea enough to drink it here; not sure if it's a habit I'll bring home with me. library_lynn says "think I'll stick with water."
The train ride from London to Birmingham was pleasant. We saw a bit of the country, or at least that part that the tracks go through. We saw farms, we saw sheep and cows and horses. We were content.
The train slowed for a meet -- another train passed us while we were stopped. We were in the middle of nowhere. Well, nowhere I knew, anyhow. There was a railway equipment box marked "Bugbrooke" that I notice as we slowed. We later learned that when we'd passed through Milton Keynes, someone had reported seeing smoke coming from the train. Since the train's electric and doesn't normally give off smoke, they stopped so the train manager (who in US parlance would be called the conductor, but train manager is a better term i think) and another guy could check it out. No sign of trouble, but it made us late enough that the train terminated a stop or two before it would have ordinarily -- it terminated at Birmingham International (where you can connect to the airport) so it could turn around right away and head back to London on time. It wasn't a huge inconvenience for us, because the train following it which would ordinarily have come by in 20 or 30 minutes caught up with us in less than 5, and we got back on to finish heading up to Birmingham New Street.
We were still early, as I mentioned. You see, Cadbury World operates on a reservation system. We were part of the 11:50 am group, so there wasn't much point to our getting to Bournville before 11 o'clock.
We strolled around downtown Birmingham, turned at the roundabout on a whim, and ran smack into the storefront for Andromeda Books. It looked like they were unpacking from a move -- is this their new location? I took pictures of Ped Badlan and Jackie Miller there. I wanted to support sf bookshops, so I bought an armload of Tom Holt. Plus the "Science of Discworld II" which I imagine will make the daughter of my heart insanely jealous. Well, no, actually; I'll probably just discover she's borrowed it indefinitely the next time she moves out of the house. But by then I'll have finished reading it, and I won't miss it so much. It'll still be in the family, after all.
Of course, this meant that before I'd even arrived in Glasgow, I'd managed to weigh down my luggage with half a dozen hardcover books; and, I'd done this on the way to Cadbury World, which meant that I'd committed us to lugging the books around all afternoon. Whoops!
When we got to the Bournville station, there were one or two other family groups (or one designated adult with the neighbors' kids), so it was just a matter of following the excited children (some of them randomly shouting "Chocolate!" from time to time) down the trail. It's about a 15 minute walk, they say, from the station to the factory.
Cadbury World. What can I say about the place that hasn't been said before? There's a slight educational aspect, which I suppose justifies schools bringing busloads of students in. You learn about the Cacao tree, and the beans, which they refer to as Cocoa beans. (I don't have a problem with that particular simplification!) They explain the Mayans and the spaniards taking advantage of Montezuma, and bringing back xocolatl to Spain. (I already knew everything they had to say about the Mayans -- growing up in California, you get a little history of Mexico in the schools.) As you may already know, the chocolate beverage that the indians drank was a spicy brew made from grinding up the cocoa beans; it's gritty and is unpalatable to modern tastes. (With an exception I'd like to point out: you can get a commercial product -- Abuelita brand -- made in Mexico that's a modern incarnation of the ancient spicy gritty drink. But I don't expect Cadbury to know that, or to promote someone else's product.)
I knew about the English upper crust drinking chocolate. I thought it was interesting how Mr. Cadbury (and later his sons) got involved in selling chocolate (as a preparation for making the drink): he was in the tea business, and because he was a teetotaller (I think they said he was a Papist -- but I thought it was the Methodists who didn't believe in strong drink) it made sense to add chocolate to the wares sold in his shop.
We learned that the Dutch -- specifically Van Houten, a name that still adorns chocolate bars today -- invented the press that extracts the cocoa butter from the cocoa beans. (If you've heard of "Dutch process" cocoa powder, this is what they're talking about.) You separate out the cocoa butter from the cocoa powder, and later you re-combine them, and that's how you make chocolate. In other words the Mayans invented chocolate, the Spaniards stole it and brought it back to Europe, but it took the Dutch to make it taste good.
And we learned that Cadbury went to the Netherlands and brought back a Van Houten press. I don't know if it was quite that simple -- a straight sale of the technology to Cadbury -- or if this was the earliest example of chocolate-related industrial espionage. If it was, it certainly wasn't the last! More on that later.
So now Cadbury could make even better instant chocolate, for drinking. Then the Swiss (specifically Nestlé, I believe, but they didn't mention them in the film; perhaps they perceive Nestlé as a competitor, but not Van Houten) figured out how to add milk to make a tasty confection. (This was a closely guarded secret for a while -- Nestlé employees were screened for loyalty precisely because of this. So again, I don't know if Cadbury was given the secret, bought it, or stole it. Anything's possible... There's a lot of spying in the history of chocolate- and candy-making; the stuff that Dahl wrote about in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is true, if fictionalized, about the big confectioners stealing secrets from each other. One famous, egregious example would be when one of the senior Mars partners (a Mr. Mars, in fact) stole the recipe for the "Mounds" candy bar, brought it to England, and to this day there's a UK candy bar called "Bounty" that's an exact copy of the American "Mounds." Chocolate coating, coconut filling.
We also learned how the process works for Cadbury. They buy their cocoa beans from Ghana, bring it in to Chirk (sp?) which is northwest of Bournville, start roasting it and whatnot, and eventually they add sweetened condensed milk to it. By the time the chocolate gets to Bournville, most of it has already been turned into milk chocolate; this is the foundation for most of Cadbury's chocolate product, including of course the Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar. (The condensed milk part of the process explains their "Glass and a half of milk" advertising; there's a lot of milk that goes into the milk chocolate, more than just the volume of the candy bar.)
As will come as no surprise to anyone who's traveled First Class on a train before, First Class means they feed you. So right after we got underway, they came around offering up coffee and tea. I got a cup of tea, and
library_lynn asked for a tea with milk; not because she wants tea, it was for me so I could try it both ways. She got a cold bottle of still water, (We've noticed that servers look at us funny when she tries to order water -- tap water -- with her meals, so we're probably going to order her bottled water more of the time when wwe dine out.) Then they took our breakfast orders. I asked for a sausage roll, Lynn ordered the fruit plate. (A sausage roll is just a sandwich where they take link sausages, slice them lengthwise, and serve them on a bun.) And they brought around orange juice. And a basket full of croissants and toast. (Cold toasted bread; that's how they do it here.) And they keep bringing more tea and coffee round... I decided I like the milky tea enough to drink it here; not sure if it's a habit I'll bring home with me. library_lynn says "think I'll stick with water."The train ride from London to Birmingham was pleasant. We saw a bit of the country, or at least that part that the tracks go through. We saw farms, we saw sheep and cows and horses. We were content.
The train slowed for a meet -- another train passed us while we were stopped. We were in the middle of nowhere. Well, nowhere I knew, anyhow. There was a railway equipment box marked "Bugbrooke" that I notice as we slowed. We later learned that when we'd passed through Milton Keynes, someone had reported seeing smoke coming from the train. Since the train's electric and doesn't normally give off smoke, they stopped so the train manager (who in US parlance would be called the conductor, but train manager is a better term i think) and another guy could check it out. No sign of trouble, but it made us late enough that the train terminated a stop or two before it would have ordinarily -- it terminated at Birmingham International (where you can connect to the airport) so it could turn around right away and head back to London on time. It wasn't a huge inconvenience for us, because the train following it which would ordinarily have come by in 20 or 30 minutes caught up with us in less than 5, and we got back on to finish heading up to Birmingham New Street.
We were still early, as I mentioned. You see, Cadbury World operates on a reservation system. We were part of the 11:50 am group, so there wasn't much point to our getting to Bournville before 11 o'clock.
We strolled around downtown Birmingham, turned at the roundabout on a whim, and ran smack into the storefront for Andromeda Books. It looked like they were unpacking from a move -- is this their new location? I took pictures of Ped Badlan and Jackie Miller there. I wanted to support sf bookshops, so I bought an armload of Tom Holt. Plus the "Science of Discworld II" which I imagine will make the daughter of my heart insanely jealous. Well, no, actually; I'll probably just discover she's borrowed it indefinitely the next time she moves out of the house. But by then I'll have finished reading it, and I won't miss it so much. It'll still be in the family, after all.
Of course, this meant that before I'd even arrived in Glasgow, I'd managed to weigh down my luggage with half a dozen hardcover books; and, I'd done this on the way to Cadbury World, which meant that I'd committed us to lugging the books around all afternoon. Whoops!
When we got to the Bournville station, there were one or two other family groups (or one designated adult with the neighbors' kids), so it was just a matter of following the excited children (some of them randomly shouting "Chocolate!" from time to time) down the trail. It's about a 15 minute walk, they say, from the station to the factory.
Cadbury World. What can I say about the place that hasn't been said before? There's a slight educational aspect, which I suppose justifies schools bringing busloads of students in. You learn about the Cacao tree, and the beans, which they refer to as Cocoa beans. (I don't have a problem with that particular simplification!) They explain the Mayans and the spaniards taking advantage of Montezuma, and bringing back xocolatl to Spain. (I already knew everything they had to say about the Mayans -- growing up in California, you get a little history of Mexico in the schools.) As you may already know, the chocolate beverage that the indians drank was a spicy brew made from grinding up the cocoa beans; it's gritty and is unpalatable to modern tastes. (With an exception I'd like to point out: you can get a commercial product -- Abuelita brand -- made in Mexico that's a modern incarnation of the ancient spicy gritty drink. But I don't expect Cadbury to know that, or to promote someone else's product.)
I knew about the English upper crust drinking chocolate. I thought it was interesting how Mr. Cadbury (and later his sons) got involved in selling chocolate (as a preparation for making the drink): he was in the tea business, and because he was a teetotaller (I think they said he was a Papist -- but I thought it was the Methodists who didn't believe in strong drink) it made sense to add chocolate to the wares sold in his shop.
We learned that the Dutch -- specifically Van Houten, a name that still adorns chocolate bars today -- invented the press that extracts the cocoa butter from the cocoa beans. (If you've heard of "Dutch process" cocoa powder, this is what they're talking about.) You separate out the cocoa butter from the cocoa powder, and later you re-combine them, and that's how you make chocolate. In other words the Mayans invented chocolate, the Spaniards stole it and brought it back to Europe, but it took the Dutch to make it taste good.
And we learned that Cadbury went to the Netherlands and brought back a Van Houten press. I don't know if it was quite that simple -- a straight sale of the technology to Cadbury -- or if this was the earliest example of chocolate-related industrial espionage. If it was, it certainly wasn't the last! More on that later.
So now Cadbury could make even better instant chocolate, for drinking. Then the Swiss (specifically Nestlé, I believe, but they didn't mention them in the film; perhaps they perceive Nestlé as a competitor, but not Van Houten) figured out how to add milk to make a tasty confection. (This was a closely guarded secret for a while -- Nestlé employees were screened for loyalty precisely because of this. So again, I don't know if Cadbury was given the secret, bought it, or stole it. Anything's possible... There's a lot of spying in the history of chocolate- and candy-making; the stuff that Dahl wrote about in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is true, if fictionalized, about the big confectioners stealing secrets from each other. One famous, egregious example would be when one of the senior Mars partners (a Mr. Mars, in fact) stole the recipe for the "Mounds" candy bar, brought it to England, and to this day there's a UK candy bar called "Bounty" that's an exact copy of the American "Mounds." Chocolate coating, coconut filling.
We also learned how the process works for Cadbury. They buy their cocoa beans from Ghana, bring it in to Chirk (sp?) which is northwest of Bournville, start roasting it and whatnot, and eventually they add sweetened condensed milk to it. By the time the chocolate gets to Bournville, most of it has already been turned into milk chocolate; this is the foundation for most of Cadbury's chocolate product, including of course the Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar. (The condensed milk part of the process explains their "Glass and a half of milk" advertising; there's a lot of milk that goes into the milk chocolate, more than just the volume of the candy bar.)
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-02 02:31 am (UTC)Jingles
Date: 2005-08-04 02:32 am (UTC)Re: Jingles
Date: 2005-08-23 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-23 03:40 am (UTC)Haven't bothered with Andromeda since Rog Peyton was squeezed out and the new owner began to drop the backlist. Damned shame, that.