Caramel first. He was a caramel man in Lancaster, boiling sugar and cream in copper, after two candy companies had already gone under on him. The chocolate came later, and it came with a problem: an American summer, a boxcar, days on a siding. You need a bar that survives heat and time and still tastes like something when it gets off the train.
So the milk goes through a process that leaves the solids slightly soured — butyric notes, the tang people either grew up on or didn't — and then it's worked and worked in the conche until it's smooth enough to snap clean. That's not an accident of the recipe, that's the recipe. He died in 1945, eighty-eight, with a town and a school built round the factory. Anyway, every shelf-stable sweet is somebody solving for distance.
The conche is the unglamorous bit: a trough with a roller going back and forth for hours, grinding the sugar crystals down past the size your tongue can feel and driving off the sharper volatiles. Lindt's in Berne, 1879. Mostly it's a machine for making grit disappear.
He'd put a deposit down on a Titanic crossing in 1912 and cancelled it — the cheque's still in the archives, which is a very strange thing to keep in a drawer. Rosa, the caramel failures feel like the real story though.