Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light

by Mort Rosenblum

Book Overview

A delectable journey into the world of chocolate--from manufacturing to marketing, French boutiques to American multinationals--by the award-winning author of "Olives." Science, over recent years, has... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865476357
• ISBN13: 9780865476356
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Properly researched and well written

I'm not one that likes journalists as a rule. But, get a good investigative journalist and get him caught up in a subject as fascinating as chocolate, and you're on to a winner. This is a book that flows as beautifully as melted chocolate in terms of writing style. And yet a lot of research has gone into the book, which gives it depth. In particular, I like the way that Rosenblum has taken the time to visit a very significant proportion of the world's greatest chocolate bar maunufacturers and chocolatiers. This provides the reader with a wonderful insight into what is required to make top quality chocolate as well as what happens when you place commercial aims above that quality. Good chocolate can be made anywhere, and the author explodes the long held myths that only the Belgians and Swiss know anything about chocolate. The section on the UK is a bit thin, but if Rosenblum had been writing this book today he would undoubtedly have marvelled at the magical creations of William Curley (voted Britain's Best Chocolatier in 2007, 2008 and 2009), the Gordon Ramsay of the British chocolate world, or perhaps Paul A. Young, chocolate's Heston Blumenthal. This is an excellent and informative book. My only criticism is that I'm not sure I really needed a whole chapter devoted to Mexican mole, a chicken/turkey dish with a chocolate sauce!

loved this book

This book was great to find out the background/history of chocolate and the inside to different "brand" names around the world. Though he skims over some "brands" and doesn't go into much detail on some, I still found it a good read.

Will appeal both to cooks and to chocolate fans who just like reading about it.

The uses and innovations of chocolate in foods from around the world at last receives embellishment in Mort Rosenblum's "Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light", a lively survey blending a travelogue with culinary history and industry insights. From chocolate's health promises to its various renditions, the pages pack in plenty of mouth-watering detail and will appeal both to cooks and to chocolate fans who just like reading about it. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

Biography of Great Product. Excellent Read

`Chocolate - A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light' by culinary journalist, Mort Rosenblum reads as a collection of essays on various aspects of the contemporary world of chocolate and its history, going back to pre-Columbian America. Anyone who has read Rosenblum's excellent book, `Olives', will recognize the style of this book, which seems to jump from one time, place, and situation to another with little rhyme or reason. The narrative is neither chronological nor in the order in which cacao is grown, harvested, refined, formed into wholesale chocolate, and used as an ingredient in truffles, bonbons, and other confections. There is actually a lot of good sense to this structure (or lack of it) in that you are much less likely to become bored with the tale. Rosenblum is not a culinary practitioner such as Elizabeth David, Julia Child or contemporary chocolate writer David Lebovitz (to whom Rosenblum owes a considerable debt, as Lebovitz shared information with Rosenblum, in spite of the fact that Lebovitz was writing his own book on chocolate). He is also not an observer of human gastronomic desires such as M.F.K. Fisher. He is not even a hybrid of these two breeds, the culinary columnist, such as James Villas, Jeffrey Steingarten, or John Thorne, who deal in both appetites and techniques. Rosenblum is a rather rare breed of journalist who specializes in writing about food, but seems to have no overriding passion for the subject. He simply seems to be interested in the subject, and, he is a very, very good observer and reporter of what he sees. The writers with the most similar approach seems to be Eric Schlosser (author of `Fast Food Nation') who, like Rosenblum, is as much interested in the economics of a food business as with taste. These writers are more like one another than they are like other writers I have mentioned, although Rosenblum is much less polemical than Schlosser. Unlike the subjects of `Olives' and `A Goose in Toulouse', where the author had an intimate connection with his subject before he began writing his book, Rosenblum was not intimately familiar with chocolate up to about two years ago. Thus, virtually all his historical information is from secondary sources, albeit, very, very good secondary sources, some dating back to the writings of the early Spanish Conquistadors. His modern information; however, is all based on interviews with primary sources, with some help from Lebovitz and a contemporary chocolate expert, Chloe Doutre-Roussel. And, just as his `Olives' book contained no recipes for sauteeing with olive oil or constructing salads or tapenades with olives, this book contains not one wit of instruction on how to do things with chocolate. For that, see Lebovitz' excellent `The Great Book of Chocolate'. This is not to say there is no practical information in this book. One of the biggest revelations should be no surprise to anyone who reads about food on a regular basis. That is, our familiar Hershey's chocolate i