[Vwoolf] Chocolate Cream

Byrne, Anne (Soc & Pol) anne.byrne at nuigalway.ie
Wed Apr 5 11:07:07 EDT 2017


Many thanks Stuart - my confidence in the meaning of 'chocolate creams' was also shaken but I too am going with the 'bar' variety. I have looked at many images of chocolate cream bars and sweets in the past few days (and eaten it also for the purposes of research). I am indebted to all who have replied to this thread and to Leonard who started and ended his autobiography, Beginning Again, with a description of the sensory experience of missing and finding his favorite treat. Fixing on chocolate creams to begin and end an autobiography, an analysis of one's own life and psyche, may or may not have been deliberate but from such fragments art can be made.


Kind regards

Anne


________________________________
From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Stuart N. Clarke <stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com>
Sent: 05 April 2017 15:36
To: 'Woolf List'
Subject: [Vwoolf] Chocolate Creams

I have returned to my earlier confidence about this topic, and agree firmly with the OED:
“An item or type of chocolate confectionery with a fondant centre. Freq. attrib., esp. in chocolate-cream bar.”

The reason for my previous unease is because I assumed that the “5 Boys” range corresponded with choc. creams, *because* the bar split into 5, as here:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=kMoSNCeH&id=CC9B8A5AFC6A91A8446911BA8AD3297C3065A6A2&q=fry%27s+5+centre+chocolate+creams&simid=608021384606843632&selectedIndex=6&ajaxhist=0
[http://www.bing.com/sa/simg/facebook_sharing_2.png]<https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=kMoSNCeH&id=CC9B8A5AFC6A91A8446911BA8AD3297C3065A6A2&q=fry%27s+5+centre+chocolate+creams&simid=608021384606843632&selectedIndex=6&ajaxhist=0>

fry's 5 centre chocolate creams - Bing<https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=kMoSNCeH&id=CC9B8A5AFC6A91A8446911BA8AD3297C3065A6A2&q=fry%27s+5+centre+chocolate+creams&simid=608021384606843632&selectedIndex=6&ajaxhist=0>
www.bing.com
Bing is a search engine that brings together the best of search and people in your social networks to help you spend less time searching and more time doing.


yet all the examples below featuring 5 Boys have nothing to do with choc. creams.  By the way, the “Five Boys Bars came out in 1902.”

So, back to Leonard Woolf.  Surely, writing in 1964, he would not use the expression “chocolate creams” in an anachronistic 1902-22 way (in other words, if choc. creams meant something different in 1902-22 from 1964, he would have explained).  And this is what he wrote:

On the first page of this book I recorded that the one thing which I remember in my return from Ceylon after seven years is the chocolate creams in Marseille. It is a strange fact—I have no doubt, discreditable to me, some unsavoury juggling between my scruffy ego and sluttish id—that one of the chief things which I remember as connected with the return from those terrible four years of war to peace is chocolate creams. A good many Belgian refugees in the first year of the war settled in Richmond and a large florid Belgian woman opened a kind of delicatessen shop (as they were called in those days) and tea-shop some way up the hill near Richmond Bridge. As the war went on
256

THE 1914 WAR
delicatessen became very thin on the ground and chocolate creams vanished. Some months after armistice day, Virginia and I, walking up Richmond Hill, looked into the shop and there upon the counter were slabs of chocolate cream bars. When I was a child, you could buy large fat bars of chocolate cream which cost, I think, a halfpenny the bar. Some were made by Cadbury and some by Fry, and if you were an addict of Cadbury, you regarded the Fry eater as a drinker of Musigny Vieilles Vignes regards the drinker of Australian Burgundy. I belonged to the Cadbury school and have remained an addict of chocolate cream in bars ever since (though I have not seen any for years). The Belgian chocolate cream bars were un-English, being thin and continental, but when we saw them, the world seemed to change just a little and we dashed into the shop and each bought three bars which was the maximum that Madame X allowed each customer to buy. We carried them back to Hogarth House and ate them silently, almost reverently. The Great War was at last over.
257

Beginning Again

Stuart


From: Mark Hussey
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2017 2:30 PM
To: 'Stuart N. Clarke' ; 'Woolf List'
Subject: RE: [Vwoolf] Chocolate Creams?

Right, well Stuart’s post reminds me of Vanessa’s “Notes on Virginia’s Childhood” which ends with a scene of the sisters buying Tit Bits “together with 3d worth of Fry’s Chocolate, taking both to Kensington Gardens to read and eat together, lying in the grass under the trees on summer afternoons.”

Looking forward to that edition of JR…



From: Vwoolf [mailto:vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu] On Behalf Of Stuart N. Clarke
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2017 7:15 AM
To: Woolf List
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Chocolate Creams?


VW’s mother-in-law had a ‘passion for chocolate creams’ (L4 241). This passion was shared by VW (L2 62) and LW (L. Woolf “Beginning Again” 1964: 15), and in 1918 they bought three bars from a shop near Richmond Bridge run by a Belgian refugee: ‘The Great War was at last over’ (L. Woolf 1964: 257).

I didn’t realise that this was a problem!  As far as I’m concerned, I think of choc. creams as a small dark chocolate with inside a creamy white filling.  The OED gives:
2. An item or type of chocolate confectionery with a fondant centre. Freq. attrib., esp. in chocolate-cream bar.
1851  Daily National Intelligencer 18 Dec. (advt.)    The subscriber begs leave to state that he has received a great variety of imported and domestic Confectionary, viz. Fancy Boxes, Chocolate Cream, Gum Drops of superior flavors, [etc.].
1860  N.Y. Times 10 Apr. 3/4 (advt.)    Maillard's Chocolate... Chocolate Creams, Chocolate Caramels, [etc.].
1861  Illustr. London News 9 Feb. 124/2 (advt.)    Frys' Chocolate Creams.
1879  C. M. Yonge Magnum Bonum I. iv. 58   We'd got nothing to eat but chocolate creams.
1893  Proc. Ackworth Old Scholars' Assoc. 12 34   To one unaccustomed to boys and their ways, a jam tart, a bar of chocolate cream, a cocoanut, and a mixture known as turkish delight..would seem to break the elementary laws of health.
1906  Daily Chron. 25 July 6/4   A shop-worn chocolate-cream bar.
1917  McClure's Mag. Mar. 48/1   In the Lowney factories most chocolate cream centers are fashioned in molds.
1992  M. Baren How it all Began 25/1   The increased demand was at least partly due to the introduction of the now famous chocolate cream bar in 1866.
2012  Weekend Austral. (Nexis) 21 Apr. 17   This is a romantic comedy, after all—as sweet as a box of soft-centred chocolate creams.

1851—2012

However, on the TV yesterday on an antiques programme, an enamel advert from what I took to be 1910-26 of the famous Fry’s 5 boys made me look at the boy on the R more closely, and he seems to have a *bar* of chocolate in his mouth rather than a choc. with a fondant centre. This here is not the ad. I saw, but similar of course (it was clearer on the one I saw):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00158N5FI?psc=1

You can find lots of them here:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=expectation+fry%27s+five+boys&FORM=HDRSC2

This is the one I saw, but it was clearer on TV (& sold for at least £2000 at auction!):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fry%27s_Chocolate_Cream#/media/File:Fry%27s_Chocolate_advertisement.JPG

I thought that Fry’s choc. creams were always like this:
https://www.cadbury.ie/products/Chocolate-Cream-2454?p=2454

I think I may be wrong: look at “Beginning Again” p. 257 more carefully.  In summary, I think chocolate cream bars were either as described by the OED or were the equivalent of bars of milk chocolate (similar to what we get today).

If anyone gets any further with this, I should be pleased to hear -- to help me with “Jacob’s Room, of course.

Stuart




From: Byrne, Anne (Soc & Pol)
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2017 11:29 AM
To: Woolf List
Subject: [Vwoolf] Chocolate Creams?





Morning All- I have a research quest which you might be able to help me with? I am looking for an explanation of what 'chocolate creams' meant in post WW1 Britain. Why? I need an image of chocolate creams as recognised by Leonard and Virginia but as I don't know what the term means I am somewhat at a standstill. Are 'chocolate creams'  hand made (or not) confectionary (sweets in a box), biscuits (perhaps like bourbons or oreos today) or are they a chocolate bar (think Fry's) or some sort of desert made of chocolate and cream? My mind is frazzled by the puzzle  and I have to say looking at the pictures of chocolate does make me chocolate hungry. The plural seems to be important - any ideas?



The context as you probably can guess is that Virginia and Leonard celebrated the end of the war together, sitting by the fire, 'sacramentally' eating 'chocolate creams', purchased from a Belgian confectioner on Richmond Hill (see Glendinning). The Bloomsbury Cookbook by Jans Ondaatje Rolls gives a recipe for same but according to a Guardian review this is more like a Swiss roll (Regretfully I don't have a copy of the book to check). Florinda in Jacob's Room is partial to chocolate creams and so might I if I knew what they were!



Margaret Cole sends 'chocolate creams' to Leonard in 1967 after reading Beginning Again (Glendinning) and other readers reputedly wished they could.



It's frivolous I know but sometimes....Looking forward to another great conference in Reading.



Warm wishes

Anne Byrne

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