Historic Deerfield Will Celebrate

Chocolate Heritage February 9

HISTORIC DEERFIELD WILL CELEBRATE CHOCOLATE HERITAGE FEB. 9

AVV 1-14 #725406

DEERFIELD, MASS. — Historic Deerfield will host the American Heritage Chocolate Celebration Saturday, February 9, from 10 am to 4 pm. This fifth annual event will focus on American Heritage Chocolate, a re-creation of colonial American chocolate produced by the historic division of Mars, Inc.

Throughout the day, there will be chocolate tastings, demonstrations, lectures and tours of museum houses. Visitors can experience traditional methods for roasting of cacao nibs over an open hearth and grinding them on a stone metate with Susan McLellan Plaisted, proprietress of Heart to Hearth Cookery.

Steve Smithers, a local silversmith, will create an authentic reproduction of Historic Deerfield’s Eighteenth Century silver chocolate pot. There will also be presentations by Amanda Lange, curatorial department chair and curator of historic interiors at Historic Deerfield, who will speak on “Sweet Concoctions: The History of Chocolate in Early America,” and Rick Lopez, assistant professor of history at Amherst College, who will discuss “A Short History of Chocolate in Latin America.”

Event admission is adults $14, youth (6 to 21) $5, under 6 and members free. Historic Deerfield is at 80 Old Main Street. For more information, www.historic-deerfield.org or 413-775-7175.