December 8, 2013 Advent with SusieJ

Maricel E. Presilla: The New Taste of Chocolate

Maricel E. Presilla's fantastic book, The New Taste of Chocolate discusses the culinary, biological and political history of my favorite fruit: the cacao pod. Presilla is chef and co-owner of the pan-Latin restaurants Zafra and Cucharamama in Hoboken, where she does things with chocolate that I can only dream about. Her writing is as good as her cooking; I was quickly converted to the need for preservering the biodiversity of the cocao plant.

Presilla begins with a personal history of cacao and chocolate. A native of Cuba, her father's family owned a cacao farm and one of her first experience was eating the pulpy flesh from ripe cacao pods. Later, she visited the farm and watched her uncles harvest the pods and aunts roast and grind the cacao, to make chocolate.

How powerful and knowledgeable these women seemed to me, taking chocolate into their own hands! Later I would always remember that I belonged to those who live with cacao and know it personally, as a tree, a fruit, an ordinary household preparation.

She traces the history of chocolate, from pre-Columbian South and Central America, through its spread into the rest of the world, from a luxury to what is practically a daily staple. She shows how cacao cultivation had changed over the centuries, from gathering, to small farms, to industrial farms, and how this affects the quality of the chocolate and the lives of the people who farm it and of those who eat it.

Taste finishes with nearly two dozen recipes from Presilla's restaurants and culinary colleagues. Some are straightforward, like Fran Bigelow's Deep Chocolate Torte, and others more complex. All are intensely chocolate, and probably best eaten in small servings.