A New York Times bestseller by Sandra Boynton with over a half-million copies in print,CHOCOLATE continues to delight chocoholics everywhere. Packed with Boynton's famous hippos, bunnies, pigs, and other animals, this gift-perfect book is a whimsical commentary on the individual's relationship to chocolate, its varieties, and its sources. From the several sorts of chocolate connoisseur-including the gourmoo, who eats only milk chocolate-to the several shapes of chocolate itself (bunny, kiss, glove compartment bar), Boynton's apologia for chocolate misses nothing. Myths are debunked: chocolate is not fattening, she argues, especially when the caloric expenditure of carrying it home from the store and hiding it from company is factored in. Directions are supplied: to remove stains, lick them. Plus, how to grow chocolate at home, a foolproof method for determining if chocolate is in season(does the name of the month contain the letter A, E, or U?), and a recipe for Hippo Pot de Mousse.
"Fourteen out of ten people like chocolate," says the artist. This is the only guide for people who like chocolate the way they like to breathe. Vanilla people, keep out.
"Those who favor dark chocolate have little patience with cute candy.""Whoever said, 'The best things in life are free' was, of course, just kidding.The best things in life go for $6.50 a pound and up."
"Chocolate is not a privilege; it is a right."
As you might expect, Boynton's a dark chocolate snob (as are so many chocolate aficionados) and she has a hilarious explanation of the "myth of chocolate's fattingness." I love that she gives helpful information on opening up your own cacao plantation -- you will need "4,000 or so cacao seedlings and time" and an international section on how to ask for chocolate in half a dozen languages.
Now besides reading about dark chocolate we can have healthy chocolate. Healthy dark chocolate. And we don't have to jokingly excuse ourselves from loving it. We can rejoice in the fact that we can finally eat chocolate guilt free.
Good Healthy Dark Chocolate
