The writer supports Nosh Food Rescue, an NGO that helps Jozi’s soup kitchens, shelters and feeding schemes with food and produce “rescued” from the food chain. Please support them here.  

After the equinox, in Jozi it’s not exactly cold but, hmm, suddenly it’s long-sleeve time, cosier autumn time, chocolate time and, mmm, luckily it’s Easter time.

I’ll be covering marzipan with chocolate this year, even though I like it as well without. There are so often marzipan eggs around for Easter, except this one it seems. I also reckon the one thing or 11 things I really like about simnel cake at this time of year are the marzipan balls as its crown. Each apparently represents a Christian apostle, minus the reportedly deceitful one, Judas.

A just-over 10 minute, eager walk from my place in Melville is Chocoloza, as African, South African or Joziate as can be. Vicki Bain, South African environmental and sustainability consultant, now owner and chief chocolatier, did spend 14 fascinated years in Belgium learning and perfecting the art. She returned here to pass on her knowledge and love of that art, to create more local chocolate makers, all women, from all over Africa because that is very Jozi too, using the chocolate grown in Africa.

The Chocoloza name purposely features the South African “za” on the end and its legend is: “Seriously Belgian. Naturally African.” The beautiful handmade chocolates come from the African beans grown on our continent, then on from where they are seriously roasted and conched best in Belgium, returning to Jozi’s Chocoloza to be turned into Easter and all chocolates, using only very local ingredients.

I want to see the new Easter eggs, real Jozi chocolate eggs, filled with real Jozi chocolate gifts, and so does friend David, who has not, in all his food travels, met a chocolatier of any kind. So I first introduce him to the swooningly good Chocoloza hot chocolate that you create by stirring Callebaut African chocolate buttons into Jozi’s famous Mooberry creamiest milk with a small balloon whisk. I am drinking chocolate nib tea, itself a delight but I know what will happen. I’ve been here often enough.

I know what will happen. I’ve been here often enough. (Photo: Chocoloza)

After the Spanish found the original cacao, ground and ritually drunk by Mayans and Aztecs, with chillies, their 16th-century folk back home weren’t madly impressed. However, a century later the Portuguese were confident enough to know they had a chocolate market if they could grow the stuff in more tropical Africa, so they planted it on the island of São Tomé before it was farmed in Cameroon, where it’s still one of the greatest producers. From there it spread along the Gold Coast. Africa, including Madagascar, today supplies a third of the world’s chocolate. 

Easter eggs were around long before the world that wasn’t Aztec had anything to do with chocolate. They hadn’t met each other yet. That’s what I wonder about while stroking 2021’s Easter eggs that Vicki shows me and David. 

It was then in those pre-Christian days, that Europe’s spring equinox, when the southern world has its autumn one, was celebrated as the day of Eostara, Eostra or Oestre, the fertility goddess. Her symbol, you may easily imagine, was the egg. It was also a rabbit, almost as well known, as a symbol of fertility.

Much later, in Christian development times, the equinox or often a day just after it, depending on the moon, was given the same name, Eostra or Easter and adopted as the rebirth day of Christ, rather than just birth generally. By then, the eggs and the rabbits were well entrenched, although there was still no word of chocolate.

Jozi’s Robin Woolley’s African Beauty Easter egg series. (Photo: Chocoloza)

We’re gawping at the designs of Jozi’s Robin Woolley’s, African Beauty series, used for the Chocoloza Easter eggs’ presentation boxes, the chocolate eggs within shimmering in edible gilt colours.

“And have you seen our chocolate protest against the northern hemisphere season bias?” asks Vicki. “Because we celebrate Easter in autumn in this part of Africa.” It’s a breathtakingly beautiful giant egg made of handmade chocolate autumn leaves in different scrumptious shades.

A giant egg made of handmade chocolate autumn leaves. (Photo: Chocoloza)

After Christianity’s overlaying of or merging with the Easter pagan fertility celebrations, came the religious practice of giving up favourite things for Lent, or spring, before the feast of Easter. Generally, meat, eggs and dairy were forbidden then. In England, the last egg consumption before the fast was Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day, a veritable feast of egginess. Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday is the same Roman Catholic pre-Lent feast.

Chickens, of course, continued to lay throughout the fasts and so there was always another big feast of eggs at Easter time, as the feast ended. Often those eggs had been hard-boiled meantime, to preserve them. Those were Christianity’s very real Easter eggs. Often they were coloured and decorated, not unlike in pagan days, given generously as gifts to those with no chickens.

By the 1700s, wealthier people in Europe and its neighbours were greedily drinking sweetened and flavoured chocolate. Early in the 1800s, the industrial revolution had rewarded the poorer classes with chocolate drinks too because steam-powered machines could produce powdered chocolate relatively cheaply and easily. 

Joseph Fry in the mid-1800s then created the magic of chocolate as we know it, by adding cocoa butter to that cocoa powder so that chocolate could be eaten as a solid. It has not stopped being tinkered with, since.

However, it was another nice thing to give up for Lent. After the fast, the feast contained both eggs and chocolates and so, after the fast, both were welcomed and eaten with delight at the Easter feasts. Britain’s Fry & Sons made the connection, creating the first chocolate Easter eggs, possibly having heard of aristocratic French and Italians who’d been pouring liquid chocolate into empty eggshells for the same post-Lent feasting purposes even a century or so earlier.

Those fertile rabbits make new appearances. (Photo: Chocoloza)

Those fertile rabbits made new appearances in their chocolate guise too, just as a fun reminder of the pagan days and Eostara. The chocolate not only got onto the eggs but onto bunnies as well, carrots, hens, hedgehogs, baskets, nests, giraffes and proteas. 

It’s easy to lose the plot a little further and both David and I gobble chocolates that aren’t necessarily for Easter, in addition to those that are. We walk off with more. I’m sure I heard David say to Vicki that his best chocolate has always been Cadbury Fruit & Nut. It’s a wonderful place and time in Jozi to make bunny leaps of relevant tastes. DM/TGIFood

Chocoloza, 44 Stanley, Milpark, Johannesburg, 010 900 4892