This is a book I really wanted to like when I first heard about it - a balanced presentation of contemporary French chocolate and culture.

Despite some flaws (which I hope will be addressed in an upcoming revision should sales prove sufficient to warrant updating the book), Chocolate French is a book I can recommend as “Extra Credit for Curious Chocophiles” for your bookshelf. With a list price of $19.55 this is not a “Must Have” except if you are planning a trip to Paris and want to mine the book for places to find chocolate while you are there.

Chocolate French: Recipes, Language, and Directions to Francais au Chocolat
TCB Cafe Publishing, San Francisco
ISBN 0-9674898-4-9

In Depth

Chocolate French is an exasperating book that I really wanted to like. It’s a very personal book with many appealing aspects. Created and edited by Andre K. Crump, TCB Cafe’s publisher, it’s a look at the French and French culture through the lens of chocolate—integrating personal reminiscences, historical information, childhood chocolate experiences, contemporary personalities and popular culture, recipes, quotes, and language instruction in a warm, approachable style that makes the book quite readable.

Thoughtfully, the book includes both chocolate and cooking terms translated from French into English along with very helpful phrases that I am already practicing my pronunciation of to use when I am in Paris next, such as: “Je ne peux pas manger assez de chocolat” (I cannot eat enough chocolate). Other things that I will use on that trip include a lead to a chef that does market tours, mention of someplace other than Angelina’s to get chocolat chaud, and the addresses of patisseries and chocolateries that I have heard of (and dread trying to figure out how to use Minitel to locate).

Unfortunately, however, the book appears to be self-edited and suffers from the lack of access to a good fact checker, researcher, and proofreader, and needs some design help to make the recipes easier to understand.

A few examples: Robert Linxe, the founder of La Maison du Chocolat, has his name misspelled as “Robert Linxie”; Helen Mirren is listed as a star of the movie Chocolat (she is not in it, and Dame Judi Dench and Lena Olin’s names are both missing from the list of players); a building in a photograph of New Orleans is misidentifed as the Cafe du Monde; chocolate is (twice) described as being a mixture of cocoa and sugar; in one of the recipes fennel seeds are parenthetically described as black cumin seeds, in another recipe one of the steps is duplicated, while in a third an ingredient that appears in the list is not mentioned in the recipe.

While there is at least one recipe that I would never personally try (the Dipped Camembert and Chocolate Sandwich), there are several others, most notably the Lamb with Dark Chocolate Sauce and the Chocolate Croissant Pudding with Toffee Sauce, Strawberries, and Pecans that I can hardly wait to taste. However, both of these recipes require very close reading for reasons stated above.

While the acknowledgements suggest that Mr. Crump has great access to people who do know chocolate, the book is under-researched in several important ways. A list of French chocolatiers mentions Jacques Torres (he may have got his MOF in France but he’s American now), but does not mention Bonnat and only barely mentions Cluizel, and two stores are mentioned as being celebrities of French chocolate thereby relegating deserving French chocolatiers to honorable mention status while others are omitted entirely.

Both Guittard and Scharffen Berger are listed as Franco-American chocolatiers despite that fact that neither is a chocolatier (they are chocolate manufacturers). A list of otherwise American chocolatiers includes Richart (which is French) but overlooks Michael Recchiuti, even though the publisher is based in San Francisco.

This lack of a broader understanding of French (and American) chocolate is reflected in the Resources section where very interesting classification decisions are presented. One example is Richard Donnelly, who is listed as a “Chocolate Maker - Cacao - Cacao Supplies” and not a chocolatier, which is what he is.

There are structural issues in addition to the design, which looks like it might have been done in a word processing program, not a page layout program. There is list of recipe contributors, but that list does not give page numbers, so you have to hunt to find what you’re looking for. Several longish passages of text in French are not translated, which is very frustrating (I can get the gist of much of it but the nuances - so important in the French language - are lost on me.) Recipes are often hard to decipher because of page formatting decisions.

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