A brief history of drinking chocolate:
1500(-ish): A crazy time. Atop a pyramid in Aztec Mexico, a brilliantly befeathered high priest rests on a huge pile of still beating human hearts and sips a deliciously refreshing (albeit, to modern tastes, rather spicy) cuppa hot chocolate. Little does he suspect that shiploads of zombie-worshipping, smallpoxed and sinisterly goatee-bearded Eurotrash are on their way to steal the recipe.
1968: A crazy time. In London, hordes of anti-Vietnam War protesters storm the American embassy. In the vanguard are hairy Maoists chanting "Ho Chi, Ho Chi Mihn—we shall fight and we shall win." Behind them are the even hairier situationists who mock the Maoists with "Hot Chocolate, Drinking Chocolate"—a popular TV advertising slogan of the time. And behind them is the still hairier Mick Jagger, who runs off squealing like a little girl when British riot police start smashing Maoist skull. But he does write a song about it—"Street Fighting Man"—obviously influenced in both its cadence and message by the hot chocolate chant.
2004: A crazy time. Wartime America looks for diversions, entertainment and escapism and to hell with the cost. Starbucks introduces a tiny $3 hot chocolate drink called Chantico (shan-TEE-ko), named after the Aztec goddess of the hearth. It's a bold move. To celebrate, Starbucks branches across America hold rituals in which that week's least efficient barista has his still-beating heart torn out atop a pyramid built out of recycled coffee grounds. Actually, that last bit never happened. There were no human sacrifices. But maybe there should have been. Because Chantico is no more. And it's all to do with us Americans being size-obsessed consumer beasts who only think we're getting value for money if we can drink or eat it out of a fucking bucket. Boy, do we suck.
Okay, a word of explanation. I'm undergoing chemotherapy, and my formerly ripe apple of an ass has gone the way of my potbelly. Which basically means that after years of eating sensibly, I am under doctor's orders to eat whatever the hell I want. "What about getting addicted to painkillers?" I ask the doc. He chuckles. "What about eating cake?" He snorts. So, to paraphrase, I am under strict medical orders to take drugs and eat cake till my eyes bleed. Which rocks. (Tip: quaaludes and Battenburg = good. Crack and layer cake = not so good.)
So there I am in Starbucks, ordering, for the first time this decade, the most evilly oversugar-loaded drink in the universe—the triple-shot 24-ounce Frappuccino. Meanwhile, my wife, in a moment of whimsy, orders a Chantico. My head timeslips to our courtship; this was when she introduced me to this tiny, super-concentrated chocolate cosmos in a cup. Six mega-intense ounces of distilled chocolate perfection (390 calories, 21 grams of fat, 51 carbs), the exquisite Chantico was the atomic-powered Kylie Minogue of beverages. I remember. I become hard. I drool.
"They stopped selling it" barks the barista. "Americans refused to believe that anything so small could be any good, and kept on demanding it in bigger sizes. Which kinda defeated the object. So they gave up."
Distraught at news of this obnoxious victory of Brogdingnagian bad taste over Lilliputian perfection, we flee in our Humvee, sucking savagely on our Fraps and stuffing our faces with banana crème cake while injecting heroin into our eyeballs. But, once home, seeking solace in bad TV, we soon learn that when one door closes, another opens. KFC has introduced the Cheesy Chicken Mashed Potato Bowl (mash, chicken and corn topped by gravy and three cheeses, all served in a fucking bucket). And suddenly all is right with the world.