Dark Chocolate and Stomach Pain / Nausea

When I was a young child, my family and I would travel to Hungary at least once per year to visit my grandparents. In their old apartment building in Pest, there lived an elderly woman called Mami. At least 90 (and no one was quite sure of her age), Mami used to always greet us fondly in a cloud of cigarette smoke and cat stank. But somewhere in her filthy kitchen, Mami kept the thing that my sister and I were always there for: chocolate. And when we'd come around, she'd pull out a large, rectangular bar from some unknown place and hand it to us while a cigarette burned in an ashtray on her table, and one of her innumerable cats ran roughshod through the cabinetry.

More often than not, Mami would give us cheap (cheerful?) hungarian milk chocolate, which, even at a young age, we knew to be inferior to the German Milka my grandmother was so fond of buying on the black market. This was Communist Hungary, after all - and the 80s no less - so while western goods were accessible, they weren't easy to come by. Even now, I have a preternatural fondness for chocolate wrapped in mauve, but I digress. Mami's choices usually reflected her income level, and our tenuous bond to her - she, a pensioner, and we, the wealthy children of a long-ago neighbor girl who managed to defect.

Mami is long since passed, but one memory of her house (besides the ominpresent Unicum) sticks out. Every once in a while, our presence on Sziv Utca (pron: sieve ooh-t-sa) would catch her off-guard, and the only chocolate she would have for us would be dark chocolate. Not for children, she'd often murmur, before handing us the industrial looking yellow and black bar.

Szerencsi Etcsokolade it would say across the front. Loosely translated, it means chocolate for eating.

But when I asked her why the chocolate wasn't for us, she's always say that it was best for stomach aches, and when you didn't feel well. That it wasn't very sweet, nor did it taste too good, but when you were sick - there was nothing better. Of course, Mami's penchant for hokey cures seems funny in retrospect (Unicum itself is billed as a health tonic) but she did live to be a hundred...and I can vouch for her advice.

Dark chocolate makes you feel better when you're nauseated. And, when you have an upset stomach, the darkest of the dark chocolates is a godsend. There's something strangely effective about semi/unsweetened chocolate when it comes to calming your GI, and I don't know what it is. All throughout my life, I've eaten pieces of dark chocolate when I feel ill, and it's always worked. My partner, and others whom I've advised, also say it works.

Are we delusional? Does it work for anyone else? Is it psychosomatic?

Oh, and Mami was at least right about one thing: that dark Hungarian chocolate sure didn't taste good to my sister or me in the midst of our penchant for the sweet, milky stuff. Fast forward to today: my sister basically won't eat anything less than 80% cacao content (100% is best) and I'm a dark chocolate buff.

Funny how an old woman can reach across the decades and still be heard