For Valentine’s Day this year, buy your significant other a chocolate book. Not to eat – to read.
Chocolate is a popular topic among authors and publishers. It has an intriguing history and is an ingredient in countless recipes. Long after the taste of a chocolate bar or bon-bon is gone, the fascination of a good book about chocolate lingers on.
I chose the volumes listed below for their content and presentation quality. Some are very academic, but still well worth reading. Most are available online or through Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, which held its 6th Annual International Chocolate Festival January 20-22, 2012.
During the recent, festival, speakers from Mars, Inc., traced the history of chocolate from its origins in South and Central America through the present day. Although they neglected The Hershey Company (for obvious reasons), they did acknowledge the conching machine, a technological breakthrough created in 1879 by Rodolphe Lindt, son of a pharmacist in Berne, Switzerland. His device dominated the modern manufacture of chocolate until others figured out how to copy it.
Joël Glenn Brenner in 1999 published a business history, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars (Random House). This book clearly describes the history and conflict between the two companies, and the origins of M&M candies.
Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao, edited by Cameron L. McNeil, was published in 2006 by University Press of Florida. This 542-page book, is illustrated with black-and-white pictures and a large index, is a useful research tool.
An encyclopedic history
Mars employees were instrumental in the creation of the 975-page book Chocolate: History, Culture and Heritage, edited by Louis Evan Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro and published in 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This extensively illustrated book has 56 chapters, multiple appendices, and a good index. It’s not a book to read cover to cover. Instead, use the index to look up topics of interest and explore slowly. Whatever your questions about chocolate, the book most likely will have the answers.
Maricel E. Presilla, a Mars consultant, published The New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes (2001, Ten Speed Press). A revised, well-illustrated 246-page edition appeared in 2009, and a new revised edition is now being prepared.
Presilla includes 43 pages of recipes. She mentions in her acknowledgments that her Ferrer paternal family settled in 1889 on their Cañas farm on the Jauco River in Cuba and was still growing cacao and coffee there in 1999. Presilla also acknowledges Susana Thrilling from Oaxaca, Mexico, who attended earlier Fairchild chocolate festivals.
“Follow the equator and you will find cacao,” Presilla writes. “Because of its particular climatic requirements, cacao was fated to become a Third World crop. Starting at the end of the seventeenth century, the Spanish carried it eastward to the Philippines, Java and other islands of present-day Indonesia, and the Malay Peninsula.”
Other Wiley chocolate books
Finding chocolate-specific books on my bookshelves is easy. Here are a few others published by Wiley in recent years:
Intensely Chocolate (2010) by Carole Bloom includes the history of chocolate, and conventional recipes.
Chocolates and Confections (2010) Peter P. Greweling is a 298-page book that is part of Wiley’s At Home with the Culinary Institute of America series. It’s for serious chefs working with chocolate.
Art of the Chocolatier: from classic confections to sensational showpieces (2011) by Ewald Notter, a beautifully illustrated 407-page book, is a marvelous teaching tool that includes information on essential equipment for cooking with chocolate.
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