Chocolate Connoisseur, by Chloé Doutre-Roussel (2005)

Bookcase Location: OFF-THE-SHELF: Book-Burners’ Fuel for the Bonfire

Frou-frou from the doyenne of good taste – a li’l ol’ lacey brown & pink etiquette manual instructing the fine art of French-kissing your bonbons. How to spoon out ganache with the flick of a tongue & occasionally discard the shell like so many spent ballistic cartridges. (Who thought only the new barbarians – Amerikids – did that kind of thing to Oreo cookies?)

So rife for taking aim at, with such wide open territory for cheap shots in the vein of ‘does anyone really read this or are publishing houses in the habit of passing out book deals nowadays the same way Planned Parenthood hands out condoms?’ But Chloé is a chocolate profiler par excellence rather than a mere writer. Besides, she largely authorized Mort Rosenblum’s Bittersweet Saga. Consider that hers; the book written under a pseudonym (but here a pseudo-pseudonym) ala Mary Ann Evans using the pen name George Eliot. And chalk the flavor of this booklet up to, like Bill Murray, Lost in Translation. It understandably must make more sense in French, in France, deep in the frippery of bonbon culture. A figment of the otherwise vast & deep reservoir that contains the wisdom of Chloé.

As for that in-depth review / wicked beatdown floating around online, complete with bedtime stories like ‘Does She Spit or Swallow?”, well… let’s leave that to the zone of privacy & personal discretion.