we have an interesting show for you today it's about valentine's day and of course i invited the story is that he was imprisoned and he helped julia the prisoners daughter who was blind to see again and of course he liked her a lot and before it was killed he wrote a letter saying i am your valentine and that's start the whole thing that people send a letter to their loved ones and that was the beginning we think and actually there was an interesting story with wrote about valentine's day he said that the love birds met on that day and then of course people all over took up this strange thing that i think on that day to their loved ones now during victorian times things changed because of course in the old days all the violent patterns were written by hand and during victorian times it became very commercial and only printed beautiful and bust valentine in the united states were planted believe it or not in massachusetts involves sister by a lady this is a victorian card there's in the land enough and at turning it over to victoria she will tell us all about why chocolate is so big in the good and tell lot me how do you eat chocolate properly and you don't just gobble it up that's right you take a little piece put it in your mouth and metals did slowly and you can really save all of it and it makes all the difference thank you and level of enjoyed chocolate this much as well thank you that's really great to hear because it is something that sometimes we when gobble things down and without even taking a breath and we don't really stop to enjoy or food and i know chocolate is my favorite thing in the world and that's been pretty much since i was born i was born a national chocolate chocolate can be good for you too there's been a lot chocolate is very healthy right away to say well i'm quite believe it but i can tell you actually a lot of the health studies have actually come out of some of boston's own hospitals and research centers and then i've read the study youth because you know how to do so yeah dark chocolates very good for you it can help meter blood flow to your major vital organs it could help improve your memory help improve your cardiac function there is even some studies that are being done they think they might be able to find treatments for alzheimer's and also chocolate me on what drinks everything better yet eat more chocolate actually dark chocolate can have up to as many three times as many as three times as many antioxidants as a cup of green tea and how often do you hear you should drink more green tea  prefer the truck yes i mean so talking about chocolate history some people know that boston actually does have some pretty strong connections to chocolate this is one of the things we talk about in our tours in our tasting classes the very first chocolate factory in the u s and actually all of north america was the bakers chocolate factory really our leader and we have a little  box here from the factory when i was a functioning factory it's no longer a functioning factory but the building is still there and he turned it into some lovely condominiums and  also have little this is was from breakfast cocoa container and you can see that it was actually it says gold medal pairs eight hundred seventy eight so this is quite old but this these were are offered to us on loan from spindler chalk split spindler confections pardon me and that's one of the partners that we've think sometimes folks need some ideas for what they can get for gifts sometimes in the little reminder too so i brought some ideas that might help some folks to explore we have some lovely chocolate shops in belmont but also beyond because chocolate has always been as i said of a part of boston's identity for a very long time so we have from spindler one of their lovely holiday themed gifts up boxes and it's filled with different types of chocolate that they do they do a lot of core fildes chocolates with bourbons and whiskeys they do other ones with not fillings  and whatnot they're all handmade in the shop hundred percent and a lot of them are family recipes that jeremy jeremy spindler has developed over the years he also makes beautiful caramels and candied fruits and other things so visit them in cambridge they also do some smaller things little gift that with nice little heart bows on them if you're just looking for a little treat maybe the kids want to let you know they deserve a little something on valentine's day chew they do different milk and dark chocolate roe shay's and little lollipops as well next we have this lovely gift basket put together by boutique of boston they're based in the westin hotel down in copley square and the owner of the air she actually not too dissimilar from you she's a very well traveled person and  she the owner or she has gone all over the world and she always thought to herself why don't we have a shop in boston that has some of my favorite things from around the world so she made her own dreams come true as you know strong women too right and she founded and created the shop that has more than just chocolate they also sell candies and teas and caviar and french and other things but they can put together a really beautiful custom gift baskets the one we have on display here is filled with what we call inclusion bars and in the chocolate world inclusion bar means a chocolate bar that has something added to it like a milling or a topping war not some kind and she truly has things from around the world she carries chocolates from france belgium united states d i everywhere you can think of and they do a really beautiful job decorating it so really you just go in and tell them you know my sweetheart likes these sorts of things and they can put something beautiful together for you the third option or i g i brought is these lovely heart boxes from toys or chocolates a switzerland on newbury street they are an authentic swiss chocolate y one hundred percent of the chocolates and the gift boxes come direct from zurich switzerland about once a week there's a direct flight that comes here really so shy of someone getting on a plane and going there themself they can't get any more authentic pounds of chocolate per year yeah so that means some people eat more than that some people left but twenty six pounds and the average american normally we think of ourselves as being the best at eating beautiful heart boxes in all different sizes this is one of the larger sized ones so maybe if you're looking to be extra impressive on valentine's day maybe you get one of those but if we open up this one over here comes the chocolate comes from in general yang chocolate comes from wealth where cocoa what chocolate is you know from grows is a very specific area in the world there's actually diversity of environment because we have mountainous areas we have islands we have rain forests we have all different things but i think i would hazard a guess that most people don't understand or or realise that the majority of the chocolate that they eat actually the beans probably came from ghana are i guess what i thought yeah about forty percent of the world's cocoa comes from just two countries ghana and ivory coast and some people don't even realize that africa is a cocoa producing area of i don't know that you know so on the roster of it you know comes from all over certainly there's a lot that comes from l leave colombia venezuela others but it all has different flavor notes to it so when folks are looking for maybe some more nuanced chocolates if they're really trying to to decide for themselves what types of specific chocolate they like you know which i like yes yes we have we have had some more chocolate tasting foods our first chocolate tasting meeting i like how they do it yeah but that's my favorite right basically there's really so much to the world of chocolate a lot of times people tend to think of chocolate in very narrow terms but there are so many interesting things people do with chocolate different ways of making it you can even have chocolate that's not sweet you can have it in savory cooking too and there are places in the in mexico they do this morley chick yeah and there's stew and cocoa rubs on steak so there's really so many ways you can go but i did bring some chocolate for you to try censure is a pain infused scream yeah and the champagne they use is actually dom perignon champagne and leon mantic stuff so they're not joking around have them isn't that you can and you can taste a little bit of the swiss mountain they are in it but do you think that if it yeah it's in the middle so that's the champagne cream so they it's not technical alcohol content because that has been cooked yeah it's just a little bit of the flavor swiss got off is very right they're very balanced they don't ever do anything that you know punches and and you the first class we did you were telling me which ones are your favorite so do you want to try some more so i'll tell you the other things so there's a milk chocolate version of that but the sugar cream and other things mostly sweet yeah well that's you know there's different when you do things you know because one was a truffle and truffles have cream adage of them that  sent for us to try brand new in the store it's can only truffle flavor and inclusion bar like what is in the gift basket and so you've had a telling can only be for right so it's those sorts of flavors and it offers up our yeah so i mean interested to hear how you like this on this one's a little gooey you have to break off a piece but yeah i want you to try it and let me now  yeah it's a finger licking chocolate flavor is good and then the chocolate here is us based chocolate year in st louis and they actually are known for doing really cool different flavor combinations and different inclusion bar as is good for them yeah yeah so it's dessert inspired case so sometimes folks want is just one that's the milk chocolate version of the the dark chocolate truffle you had earlier so the champagne truffles come in milk and dark oh so you can have that i can't remember the last day i went without having chocolate so i usually have some what's your favorite i'll say that yeah the dark  one of those things where i can tell you when we do and you saw when we do our classes when we do tours i always start everything off with having people go around and say what their favorite chocolate is and it's  or i need to china but it just gets everyone thinking about how much chocolate actually is a big part of our lives it we think about how many holidays and really special occasions it's associated with you might remember like a great birthday where your mom made this amazing chalked and you'll never forget it or this tiny when now and how to get a great date with someone and had you know shared a chocolate sundae or something and it really it's a really cool thing and i've seen how it can it really does on people and designs fabulous yeah it's an item they haven't been good at i'm glad thank you yeah you're so welcome kitty thank you for having me so now talk a little bit of what you do so the tours go year round right now we have tours in back bay and south and those neighborhoods but we're working on a  few new tourist and some new neighborhoods and how about the one about the politics i think that would be very infamous say so yeah so i've done through the cambridge center for adult education and also people can book privately and i also recently gave a talk at harvard about it the politics of chocolate which is basically discussing some of the you know the nitty gritty of the chocolate worlds and getting into there's geo political issues because you think about the kosovo is the behind the money in that well yeah that's and that's part of you know the discussion there's a lot of issues with child slave labor on there's a lack of women own plantations and cooperatives because a lot of these are third world countries there are some folks that work to harvest cocoa the hardest part of the job right at the beginning using big machetes backbreaking grueling work out in the jungles in the forests and have never gotten to taste chocolate realize they get paid less in a day than what it technically they have to open the pod and then there's beings that are covered in pulp and they strip off the pulp and let the beans and they usually they layer them in big pong fronts to let them from men's a few days and then they get laid out under the sun to dry out and then they'll get roasted and after they've been broached stand within those some chocolate years will ship the being the beans out of the pod but before they've been  roasted there used to be a chocolate shop on newbury street called hotel shock a lot they're based out of the u k they are one of the few chocolate years that i know of that will ship beans wet because roasting develops a lot of similar actually when you get single origin bars that are from colombia venezuela single origin is type of chocolate bar like we talked about inclusion bars before single origin bars means the beans came from one specific area and so if you get one from a place like venezuela you'll get chocolate that naturally has coffee notes to it hasn't even been added while though you can certainly get