Some foods work together better than others. This is a simple idea, but there are wide spaces for enormous variations. The most unlikely combinations can become marvelous discoveries, when prepared in just the right way, and usually fantastic complimentary flavors can easily be made into something less than pleasing when something is off just a bit. It is very much like tires to roads, where the agreements between the chemicals in each can cause a positive reaction or a negative one. Toyo tires don’t take to the streets so well out of mere coincidence, but by design.
This is where food becomes something altogether all-encompassing, because no matter how juicy the metaphors are in cooking, there is nothing else that can compare in quite the same way. Adding chocolate to a dish can be very much like a better motor oil in an engine, but looking for new wheels at performanceplustire.com won’t have the same visceral experience as working with the ingredients to see how they might behave this time. Cars are predictable in a way that food is not.
It isn’t difficult to see why there are so many metaphors for love when it comes to food, and this is particularly the case with chocolate. As Laurie Esquivel made perfectly evident in her description of champandongo, it’s not necessarily the addition of chocolate that suddenly makes the meal stand out, as if it were a carefully considered afterthought.
The meal is made for the chocolate, and all the moments leading up to the addition were a preparation and a waiting, and it is this waiting that makes it so entirely relatable to love. Tires work with pavement instantly, but chocolate tends to come on slowly, and love works on all the senses in ways that chocolate can only approximate. It is a geometrically-increasing complexity.
But while there may be more metaphors for chocolate and love, it’s easier to find evidence of car tires in films than chocolate in movies. The film world is more literal than metaphorical these days. A car, car tires, things of the road, are more solid and dependable, and less ambiguous. A vehicle can be a metaphor for something else, but this is usually obvious, with layers that reach fairly shallow depths. But there are places where rich layers can find themselves, films where those who love metaphor and love equally can find reflections, and recipes that keep the mouth watering and waiting, enough like a metaphor for chocolate to count as the same thing.

