A Book You’ll Want To Devour

I don’t admit it often, but I’m not much of a chocolate person. Unlike most people, if offered a choice between a chocolate and a non-chocolate dessert, I almost always choose the non-chocolate one, and I don’t know anything about how to tell good chocolate from not-as-good chocolate.

But chocolate lovers need not give up on me yet—as I read Mort Rosenblum’s “Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light,” I found myself voluntarily picking up chocolate and eating along.

Rosenblum, author of “Olives” and a former editor of the International Herald Tribune, offers a tour of the people, places, and companies that have made chocolate great. From the intricacies of how cacao is refined to which Parisian chocolatier is truly the best, even chocolate connoisseurs will find nougats of new information in Rosenblum’s work.

Rosenblum’s sweet saga begins in Mesoamerica, the birthplace of chocolate. Archaeologists say that the Mesoamerican Olmec people drank chocolate several millennia ago. And when Hernan Cortes and other conquistadors arrived in Mesoamerica, they were fascinated by chocolate. But most Europeans took some time to fall in love with chocolate—it wasn’t until the 1580s that they started processing and eating it in large quantities.

It is this modern preparation and consumption of chocolate that truly interests Rosenblum. From contact-period Mesoamerica, he jumps to present-day France, where chocolate makers like Patrick Roger and Jacques Genin compete to prepare chocolate that is artistic as well as delicious. Rosenblum also introduces the jargon of chocolate—for instance, a palet d’or is a standard square of chocolate, a couverture is its covering, and the word couverture also applies more generally to all fine chocolate.

Rosenblum’s guide on his European adventures is Chloe Doutre-Roussel, a French chocoholic who once scaled the wall of Valrhona’s Rhone Valley factory in order to catch a glimpse of production at her nation’s most secretive chocolatier.

What makes the interior of Valrhona’s headquarters so alluring? Consuming one of the vaunted company’s carefully-crafted chocolates is a transcendent experience for Rosenblum and fellow connoisseurs. When Rosenblum samples a Valrhona specimen in a Paris shop, he writes: “A subtle but unmistakable parfum of fresh mint flooded my mouth, and a peppery undertone sent happy pinprick signals to corporeal outposts.”

Doutre-Roussel succeeds in her attempt to penetrate Valrhona’s closely-guarded headquarters, but she fails in her later mission. As the chocolate buyer at the London department store Fortnum & Mason, she undertakes a quixotic bid to introduce the British to fine chocolate. But she quits in frustration at her customers’ persistent desire to buy violet creams.

Rosenblum jumps from Europe and its fine chocolate to America’s chocolate giants—Hershey’s and Mars. Those most knowledgeable about chocolate put down these companies’ offerings. But Rosenblum explains that, as Hershey’s has constructed an amusement park and town in Pennsylvania, it has also built up an image of a clean, wholesome lifestyle that still attracts visitors and customers.

Rosenblum’s attempt to find and analyze the best chocolate even takes him south of the border. In Mexico, he watches as “mole mama” Martina Tlacoxolat makes mole, a thick chili-and-chocolate sauce that garnishes a traditional chicken dish. Just as Europeans debate over whether the best chocolate is made in France, Belgium, or Switzerland, Mexicans argue over which region has the best mole poblano, with Puebla and Oaxaca the primary contenders.

But perhaps the most pressing issue for Rosenblum is not how chocolate came to Europe, which company prepares it better, or where to get the best mole. It is how cacao is grown and the way the chocolate market functions from cacao pod to couverture. To answer this question, Rosenblum travels to the most common sources of cacao—including Venezuela and what he calls West Africa’s “chocolate coast.”

In Sao Tome and Principe, two islands that compose a former Portuguese colony south of Nigeria, Rosenblum visits the cacao plantations of Claudio Corallo, who, like all cacao-growers, loses 21 percent of his crop to disease and 25 percent to pests. His house has no electricity, and his day starts at 5 a.m. and lasts past sundown. Despite this, Corallo’s situation is probably preferable to the backbreaking labor his employees endure. And yet he sees few of the tremendous profits collected by the large chocolate companies that compete for his beans.

If “Chocolate” has any flaw, it is that the information is too scattered. From Mesoamerica, Rosenblum jumps to France and then back to Mexico and then to France again. Though some chapters focus primarily on growers, information about cacao cultivation is also woven into other sections of the book. Sometimes it is difficult to keep track of Rosenblum’s journey.

But for those who make the effort to keep up, “Chocolate” is as satisfying as a creamy coconut ganache inside an expertly-crafted almond couverture. The book itself is printed in chocolate-colored ink so alluring that if Rosenblum’s prose weren’t as eloquent, I might have eaten the pages. By the last word, even this non-chocolate-lover was hungry.

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.