{"id":1855,"date":"2014-10-12T18:06:21","date_gmt":"2014-10-13T01:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/?p=1855"},"modified":"2018-03-03T18:07:26","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T02:07:26","slug":"intuition-and-chocolates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/archives\/1855","title":{"rendered":"Intuition and Chocolates"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood long ago, a little square building was home to ERNA Chocolates, named for the late wife of the owner, Naftali Blumenau. Mr. Blumenau and his lady companion made the best chocolates ever. I went and bought some pretty often.<\/p>\n

You went up a couple of steps, through a door centered in the front wall, and found yourself before a glass counter displaying chocolates. Behind the counter, a dark old curtain spread from left to right, with a split in the middle. Many old, signed photos hung on the walls. It was all very small.<\/p>\n

A few moments after you entered, you\u2019d hear a shuffling sound, the curtains would part, and Mr. Blumenau, in his slippers, would come out to wait on you.<\/p>\n

Chatting with him over a number of visits, I learned that, one night long ago (\u201clong ago\u201d from then<\/em>, which was 40 years ago from now), he had walked the Nevsky Prospekt, in St. Petersburg. The next morning, he left \u201cPeter\u201d and Russia forever, and came to the United States.<\/p>\n

I wanted Mr. Blumenau to know that I appreciated his history, so I told him about my favorite of his chocolates. It was like a small rock, perhaps an inch in diameter, and very irregular. At the center was a nugget of semi-sweet chocolate; around that, a layer of bitter-sweet\u2014less sweet than the semi-sweet; and the outside was dusted with cocoa powder, completely bitter.<\/p>\n

As soon as the outside touched your tongue, you got the bitterness of the cocoa powder, before you\u2019d really begun to bite. By the time you\u2019d assimilated that bitterness, your bite had arrived at the semi-sweet in the middle, which by contrast tasted positively sweet.<\/p>\n

The size of the piece played a role. If it had been much larger, you might not have the cocoa-powder bitterness still on your tongue when you arrived at the semi-sweet, and the contrast would have been less.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you invent this?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d he replied modestly.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re a genius!\u201d I exclaimed.<\/p>\n

Eyes lowered, hands clasped, he murmured, \u201cThank you.\u201d Accepting no more than his due.<\/p>\n

I asked, \u201cAre you a musician?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI ask because I see so many musicians on your walls. I\u2019m a musician myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course you are; you\u2019re a pianist.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was surprised, but not very very surprised; I\u2019ve always thought you could tell a pianist\u2019s face. The poster for that old film \u201cThe Competition\u201d always seemed absurd to me. It showed the male and female leads playing four-hands, and I thought neither had a pianist\u2019s face. I didn\u2019t see the film.<\/p>\n

I told all this to an acquaintance who happened to know Mr. Blumenau; and he told me about someone he knew who had also visited ERNA Chocolates\u2014but just once. This man entered and waited; and in a few moments, Mr. Blumenau shuffled out.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood afternoon, doctor; how may I help you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did you know I\u2019m a doctor?\u201d asked the first-time visitor.<\/p>\n

\u201cA doctor has a certain way of entering a room, closing a door behind him,\u201d said Naftali Blumenau; and when you think about it, he was right.<\/p>\n

\u201cOK, you\u2019re so smart,\u201d said the doctor, \u201cwhat kind of doctor am I?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re a psychiatrist, of course.\u201d Again he was right.<\/p>\n

Eyes wide, the doc felt for the doorknob behind him, and exited backwards.<\/p>\n

The romantic departure from Russia, the exquisite chocolates, the squat little building in Hollywood, the powerful intuition\u2014might be out of M. F. K. Fisher, the great food writer, whose brother-in-law was the great and little-known pianist Edwin Fischer. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood long ago, a little square building was home to ERNA Chocolates, named for the late wife of the owner, Naftali Blumenau. Mr. Blumenau and his lady companion made the best chocolates ever. I went and bought some pretty often.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1855"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1856,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1855\/revisions\/1856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}