Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light

For my birthday I received a copy of Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light by Mort Rosenblum -- a most excellent book about all things chocolate.  Rosenblum covers pretty much everything that you would want to know, starting with the history of chocolate and moving on to the current state of cacao production from the plantation to the factory (both large and small), finishing with a look into some of the finer (and not so fine) ways in which chocolate is used today.

Rosenblum draws you in with seductive passages which describe the smell and taste of chocolate, but is equally interesting while discussing cacao bean production.  He literally travels the world in order to explore this amazing bean and bring his knowledge to the reader. 

The book was so well written, that I had to ration it out -- reading only 1-2 (or 3-4) chapters a night. And I'm not the only one who thought so -- this book won the IACP Cookbook Award in 2006 for best literary food writing.   If you are interested in all things chocolate -- from where and how it is grown, to what the French master chocolatier can do with it -- read this book!