O what is longer than the way?

Riddles set by sovay




1. What's the most interesting thing made with chocolate you have ever eaten?



I like my chocolate pure, dark, and daemonic. No wasabi, no lutefisk, no asafoedita. Though nowadays I do appreciate a little contrast, like citrus or creme anglaise.



(I would love to have your chocolate cake with raspberries again. My own is pretty quietly intense, if I say so myself.)



Wellesley used to serve Pompadour Pudding on state occasions: one each, young ladies, ruthlessly enforced. Little blue cups of baked custard, each with an adorable chocolate souffle for a hat.



Twenty-five years ago, my friend the CV and I raced around the Square with an ice chest, getting pints of chocolate ice cream for a serious tasting (with Bath Olivers and Perrier to clear the palate). The winner was a little hole-in-the-wall on Mount Auburn, long gone; they did a bittersweet with flecks.



Gus of Tosci's once made me up a tub of special dark bittersweet chocolate ice cream. He uses Valrhona. His brother at Rancatore's does another fabulous variant.



I have fond memories of the old Chocolate Fools Day in Cambridge, before they started doling out ten tickets for ten small bites of patisserie. Back then, a score or so of bakeries and restaurants would strive to out-dessert the others, for charity. They just heaped it up in Lucullan superfluity and opened the doors to the onslaught: a frenzy, fork-madness, a theobrosimachia.



Everything at Burdick's is to die for.



For sheer lunatic panache, I love the Finale extravaganza that looks like a Dadaist hat. It's like eating a story by Kelly Link.



Before that? The Dutch landscape in chocolate, windmill-crowned, Catherine-wheeled, that I had at the Vijff Vlieghen in Amsterdam in 1971. They dimmed the lights; the waiter bore it in, whirling sparks of colored fire.



2. What film character would you most like to spend time with?



Films mostly make me long for places, for elsewhere and otherwise and then. I want to walk down that green lane that camera skims, past the reapers in the rustling, and up into the hills. I want to browse Orlando's library. I want to embark for Mongolia.



And really, many of the characters I love in film would be intolerable in person.



Who do you think I'd get on with?



3. What's your favorite memory of spring?



Oh, bluebell woods. In Somerset and Yorkshire and Norfolk, over several years. They're all part of the great wood, as all scraps of blue are one sky.



Fall and winter are my seasons here; but the English spring is astonishing.



(I cheated on the Cloudish fall; it's fierier than England's.)



4. What time would you like least to have lived through?



The Holocaust.



5. Who would you sing back from the dead for a day?



Right now my mother: there are things unsaid.



But calling back the dead makes me uneasy. Is it right to command them? I'd rather journey to meet them, if I could get there and back.



But oh, I want so much to have tea with madamebuttery . I so want to talk with DWJ; I didn't get to visit her these last few years, and now I never will. And I'd give anything to hear all the Watersons together again. If I were lost they'd sing me back.




Nine