Guild of Confectioners

An organisation representing the interests of Ankh-Morpork's manufacturers of sweetmeats, toffees, and what it chooses to define as chocolate.

It is no friend of Wienrich and Boettcher, as the guild believes as an article of faith that foreigners cannot make chocolate the way Ankh people like it. W&B simply do not understand the peculiarities of the city's tastebuds. In its press release, the Guild explains that Ankh-Morpork people are hearty no-nonsense folk who simply do not want "chocolate" which is stuffed with a potentially poisonous 70% cocoa liquor. They are certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who want real cream stuffed into everything.

In fact, they actually prefer chocolate made from (a glass and a half of?) milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders, and powdered cocoa husks (ingredients listed in order of quantity - or at least, what may well go in to making it, depending on what's in the vats at the time).

According to the food standards of the great chocolate producing centres in Quirm and Borogravia, Ankh-Morpork chocolate is formally classed as "cheese" and only just escapes being labelled as "tile grout" on grounds of colour.

Ankh-Morpork chocolate is to real chocolate what a C.M.O.T. Dibbler sausage is to meat.

Annotation

This may be a thinly-disguised commentary on what the British confectionary industry is pleased to call chocolate, and the way this optimistic claim is received in European countries with a longer and deeper relationship with the cocoa bean and a corresponding reluctance to cut corners by using cheap and possibly inferior ingredients. Eg, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, all of whom appear to believe that at the very least, true chocolate should have a 60-70% cocoa butter content. Compare this to the 40% which is legally acceptable in Britain, or (I believe) the 25% which is permissible in the United States. As a matter of fact, even British people brought up on Cadbury's oversweetened and under-cocoa-buttered product will wince at the taste of an American "chocolate" product such as Hershey's, which with the best will in the world tastes like cheap and nasty cooking chocolate. The question arises: is this the same reaction a European, from a more chocolate-literate society, might have to the taste of British chocolate? Yes.