Like a recovering alcoholic who knows exactly when he took his last drink, I can tell you when I had my last cup of hot chocolate.

It was Nov. 17, 2020. A Tuesday.

It's not that I quit cold turkey. It's not that I said I would never have hot chocolate again. It's not that I had the best hot chocolate of my life on that day (though it happens to be true) and I vowed to never sully the memory of that experience by sipping inferior hot chocolate.

It's just that, as an adult, I am not particularly drawn to hot chocolate. Regular chocolate, yes, in almost any form. But once it turns into a creamy, warm liquid, not so much.

I probably wouldn't have had it on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020, either, except for my job. That was the day I made two varieties of homemade hot chocolate, plus a batch of hot chocolate ice cream, for a story that would run the following week.

One of the recipes I made that day came from the cookbook "Tasting Paris" by Clotilde Dusoulier, a book I cherish so much that my wife calls Dusoulier my girlfriend.

I should be so lucky.

Her recipe yields an astoundingly velvety hot chocolate, created by caramelizing the sugar before adding milk and high-quality bittersweet chocolate.

The other hot chocolate I had that day was even richer. It came from the cookbook for Claridge's, the luxury hotel in London. Their brilliant idea is to make a smooth ganache by pouring hot heavy cream over chocolate to melt it, and then thin it out to a drinkable level with hot whole milk.

Five years later, I'm still in awe of those hot chocolates. I think about them more often than I should. But I don't drink them.

Our culture tells me I should, or at least the weird corners of culture that I inhabit. I am speaking specifically of Hallmarkland.

Hallmarkland is a magical and wonderful place where everyone is happy all the time. It's definitely somewhere in the United States, although many of the accents and all of the scenery is Canadian (the exception being when royalty is involved, usually a prince, in which case it's definitely some European country you've never heard of, with Canadian accents and scenery).

Nobody drinks water in Hallmarkland. No one even drinks milk, not even the uniformly precocious children.

But everybody — everybody — drinks hot chocolate. I saw one movie there in which the characters literally drank hot chocolate in six different scenes.

The hot chocolate is always served in ludicrously enormous mugs, like quart-sized mugs, and the characters wrap both hands around them to warm their fingers on a winter's night or perhaps just to hold up the huge mugs.

And there's one more thing: The mugs are always empty. You can tell by the way the characters hold them that there is no liquid in them at all. Apparently, they don't like hot chocolate any more than I do.

It was not always thus. As a child, I loved cocoa as much as the next kid. We even had special cocoa mugs at my house when I was growing up with our names on them: Albert for my father, David for my brother, Dan for me and Ralph for my mother.

My mother's name is Beth. Not Elizabeth, just Beth. The store had cocoa mugs with lots of names on them, but no Beth. My father decided the next best option was Ralph. My mother didn't think it was as funny as he did.

I wonder where that mug is today. If I had it, I'd probably make some hot chocolate to put in it.

I mean, I'm not opposed to hot chocolate as a concept. I just don't drink it.

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