Joanne Harris – Choc Affair and Chocolat & Co fundraiser

Joanne, whose new book Vianne is a prequel to her best-seller Chocolat, appeared at a sold-out event at the Spurriergate Centre on Thursday (April 2) that took place as part of the York Chocolate Festival and raised money for Chocolate & Co.

Before this, she visited the Choc Affair factory in James Street and was given a tour of the building – making and packaging her own chilli chocolate by following one of her titular character’s own recipes from the book.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Joined by friend and master chocolatier David Greenwood-Haigh, Joanne mixed her chocolate recipe herself and created the bars from scratch – pouring them into a mould and cooling them, before taking on the Choc Affair team in a wrapping challenge.

The bars she created were then split among the guests later that evening at her event: a talk and Q&A which raised funds for Chocolate & Co: a not-for-profit community cafe in Lowther Street, in the Groves, which supports people recovering from addiction and social exclusion through paid work and training.

Joanne said she was invited to attend the event by Linda Barrie – who owns both Choc Affair and Chocolate & Co – and that she was more than happy to take part in order to support the cause.

James and David being given a tour of the factory by operations manager Richard (Image: Alice Kavanagh)

She said: “For some reason, places that have to do with chocolate keep inviting me along to things – how great is that? It’s a really great project and really worthwhile to be a part of this.

“It’s interesting because when I first wrote Chocolat, I didn’t really know anything about chocolate that I hadn’t read from the first four pages of the Mary Ford Chocolate cookbook, but now I get to hang out with people like this who are incredibly knowledgeable and glean a bit of their knowledge.

“By creating these bars, we can share them at the event – we could give the guests the taste experience as well as the reading experience; people will be able to stack their pleasures.”

Working together with David, Joanne shared that the recipes created for the book were influenced by different ingredients – adapting traditional recipes, such as Mexican mole or the use of the cacao pod, into chocolate flavours that may be new and exciting for Western palettes.

Joanne putting her chocolate mix into the moulds (Image: Alice Kavanagh)

Joanne added: “I find it’s much better to start with things that brought the novel to life – the senses, the smells, the tastes, the recipes, the stories behind all this.

“David created a ganache when we worked together on the One Show using Provance style herbs as the book is based in Marseille. The region has associations with sense, flavours, and plants that grow, so we took some of the regional flavourings.

“When I’m working, I usually start off with a scent as it’s generally one of the things that propels me and that’s why the books are so full of scent and tastes and the things we associate with those things and that’s why there’s so much food but it’s also about humans and how they process the world.”  

She explained that she first came up with the idea to write a sequel for Chocolat around five or six years ago whilst recording an audiobook of the novel.

Joanne packaging her chocolate (Image: Alice Kavanagh)

Joanne said: “I don’t generally plan things ahead a lot – I have little germs of ideas and I think I could do that or I could go to this place. People assume I had a lot of these ideas when I was writing Chocolat, but that’s not really true.

“I started to write this book when I was recording the audiobook – that made it a lot easier and when I was listening, I thought I have to bear that in mind or that’ll be useful, so you’ve got all these sneaky references that look intentional but they were retrofitted.

“I didn’t know Vianne’s story when I wrote Chocolat, because she hadn’t told me. That’s why in the book there’s a lot of unanswered stuff; whenever I do an event, people go will you write a prequel about her mother as she’s present all the time, but she’s already dead.

“Actually, there’s lots of things she doesn’t know about her mother, so at some point, I may have to go even further into the past and write a prequel to the prequel – that might be quite fun.”

James, David, and Joanne (Image: Alice Kavanagh)

James Bye, business development manager for Choc Affair, said that it was a ‘pleasure’ welcoming Joanne to the factory and that it felt like a natural fit having her visit the factory before her fundraiser.

He said: “We thought it would be nice to have her visit us to make the bars that feature in the book. It’s been a pleasure welcoming her today.

“Over the last 20 years, we’ve gone from Linda founding us in her kitchen as she wanted to make a drinking chocolate for her daughter who is lactose intolerant and from there, it’s been a massive development. We’ve just expanded our production again and we hope to keep supplying independent businesses in the UK.

“Core to our beliefs are our ethical principles: we buy all of our chocolate from one source in Columbia and for every kilo of chocolate, we put five per cent back to projects at ground level.

“At the moment, we sponsor a project that helps children in marginalised areas, especially those affected by the drug trade, and show them there’s other ways to make a living through cacao. We’ve also done ways to get to school, reforestation, and we also support local projects here in York.”