This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Linking up at Adventures in reading, running and working from home.
I usually have an idea for this week long before November rolls around. This year I was stuck until I read Wild Chocolate in late October.
Wild Chocolate
by Rowan JacobsenSetting: Brazil, Bolivia, Belize
Genres: Cooking / Specific Ingredients / Chocolate, Social Science / Agriculture & Food
Published on October 8, 2024
Pages: 288
Format: eARC Source: Netgalley
From James Beard Award-winner Rowan Jacobsen, the thrilling story of the farmers, activists, and chocolate makers fighting all odds to revive ancient cacao and produce the world's finest bar.
When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. The waxy mass-market chocolate of his childhood had left him indifferent to it, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling bite of Cru Sauvage was all it took. Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back through history, Jacobsen travels the rainforests of the Amazon and Central America to find the chocolate makers, activists, and indigenous leaders who are bucking the system that long ago abandoned wild and heirloom cacao in favor of high-yield, low-flavor varietals preferred by Big Chocolate.
What he found was a cacao renaissance. As his guides pulled the last vestiges of ancient cacao back from the edge of extinction, they'd forged an alternative system in the process-one that is bringing prosperity back to local economies, returning fertility to the land, and protecting it from the rampages of cattle farming. All the while, a new generation of bean-to-bar chocolate makers are racing to get their
hands on these rare varietals and produce extraordinary chocolate displaying a diversity of flavors no one had thought possible. Full of vivid characters, vibrant landscapes, and surprising history, Wild Chocolate promises to be as rich, complex, and addictive as good chocolate itself.
This book checked all kinds of boxes for me. It was a foodie book. It is mostly set in South America and I’m trying to read more books set there. It is a story of trying to set up systems of sustainable agriculture by moving back in time and growing wild cacao varieties in the shade of mature rainforest trees.
When Europeans fell in love with chocolate during colonial times, they exported cacao production from South America to Africa because it was closer to Europe. They favored trees that would produce in monocultures on plantations. In doing that they selected for varieties that weren’t as flavorful but would store better than the traditional cacao that was grown in pre-contact South America. Some of those varieties remain though and there are companies who are trying to build a bean-to-bar market for them. It is hard going though. The harvests can be small. They may be working in areas frequented by drug cartels. The weather may cause the beans to mold instead of ferment properly or make transporting them to market all but impossible.
I plan on buying a few of the bars from the makers featured in this book from a speciality store for Christmas. I’m really interested in trying them to see if someone without a super refined palate can tell the difference in the terroir of the chocolate.
I’m pairing this book with a historical fiction novel about the introduction of chocolate into Europe.
The Chocolate Maker's Wife
by Karen BrooksSetting: London
Genres: Fiction / Women
Published on August 20, 2019
Pages: 591
Format: eARC Source: Book Tour
Rosamund Tomkins, the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, spends most of her young life in drudgery at a country inn. To her, the Restoration under Charles II, is but a distant threat as she works under the watchful eye of her brutal, abusive stepfather . . . until the day she is nearly run over by the coach of Sir Everard Blithman.
Sir Everard, a canny merchant, offers Rosamund an “opportunity like no other,” allowing her to escape into a very different life, becoming the linchpin that will drive the success of his fledgling business: a luxurious London chocolate house where wealthy and well-connected men come to see and be seen, to gossip and plot, while indulging in the sweet and heady drink.
Rosamund adapts and thrives in her new surroundings, quickly becoming the most talked-about woman in society, desired and respected in equal measure.
But Sir Everard’s plans for Rosamund and the chocolate house involve family secrets that span the Atlantic Ocean, and which have already brought death and dishonor to the Blithman name. Rosamund knows nothing of the mortal peril that comes with her new title, nor of the forces spinning a web of conspiracy buried in the past, until she meets a man whose return tightens their grip upon her, threatening to destroy everything she loves and damn her to a dire fate.
As she fights for her life and those she loves through the ravages of the Plague and London’s Great Fire, Rosamund’s breathtaking tale is one marked by cruelty and revenge; passion and redemption—and the sinfully sweet temptation of chocolate.
This is a richly detailed novel about the other side of the chocolate story. These are the Europeans who were exploiting the people of South America to claim chocolate for themselves.
I loved this book but it didn’t pull any punches. The treatment of women in this book was rough but unfortunately probably accurate. An impoverished noblewoman was married off to get herself out of an abusive household. Her new husband has her working in his chocolate house. This is a new kind of establishment. A working woman was considered to be part of the merchandise for sale by many of the men who came in even if she wasn’t on the menu. She gradually establishes the chocolate house as her domain though and learns what she can do with the drink. It gives a great idea of how people lived at a time when chocolate was the newest novelty in England.
Nice! Who doesn’t love chocolate, ha!
How interesting, a great pairing!
Fascinating!
Perfect pairing!
What a great pairing! I want to read them both. Especially as I grow and make chocolate 🙂
A great pairing, thanks for sharing
I’m loving the sound of The Chocolate Maker’s Wife. It really sounds like my kind of historical fiction. Thanks for sharing!