Darkly compelling

As a longtime Paris-based “special correspondent” for the Associated Press, Mort Rosenblum visited almost 200 countries on seven continents and covered virtually every important story of the last 40 years -- war and peace, genocide and terrorism, floods and famines, coups and coronations, elections, earthquakes and epidemics, the rise of the Asian economy, the fall of communism. You name it, he was there, pen and notebook in hand.

But Rosenblum, who’s also written 11 books, on topics as varied as olives, journalism and French nationalism, says he’s never taken on an assignment as challenging or as satisfying as his newly published “Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light.”

The book is a fascinating account of the history and mystery of chocolate. Rosenblum spent four years traveling the world, from Mexico to the Ivory Coast, exploring the origins of chocolate, its economics, its appeal, its widely varying quality and its effect on the mind, the heart, the waistline and the libido. He writes about poverty, slavery, exploitation and corruption, and he weaves through his globe-hopping narrative several explanations of different chocolate-making processes, as well as mini-profiles of a number of engaging characters in this $60-billion, often cutthroat industry.

I’ve known Rosenblum casually for more than 25 years, since we met at a dinner party in Paris when he was editor of the International Herald Tribune. We’ve eaten together periodically since then when he’s come here and when I’ve gone to France, where -- when he’s not traveling -- he divides his time between a five-acre spread in Provence and a houseboat moored on the Seine, in the heart of Paris.

Last week we had dinner at Spago -- to catch up, to talk about his chocolate book and to sample the chocolate desserts of Sherry Yard (not necessarily in that order of importance).

The first thing he tells me as we sit down is that he doesn’t work for AP anymore.

“They decided in November that they no longer need someone based in Paris to run around the world and dig long and deeply into big stories,” he says.

But he doesn’t want to dwell on the subject. “I’m having too much fun with the chocolate book and I’ve got ideas for two more books and I’m hungry,” he says, “so let’s eat.”

Eat we do. Chef Lee Hefter sends out course after course, and when course 15 arrives -- Kurobuta pork -- Rosenblum takes one look at the reddish-brown streak next to the pork, grins broadly, nudges me and says, “Mole -- again. Finally.”

Rosenblum loves mole and devotes much of one chapter in his book to his quest for the perfect mole in Oaxaca. On his last visit, he had specifically requested that we go to a Oaxacan restaurant so he could order mole. We went to Guelaguetza in Koreatown, and he was a very happy fella.

But this is Spago, not Guelaguetza, and the small, dark stream alongside the pork is not mole but blood sausage puree.

He loves it anyway.

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Saving room for sweets

Still, when more sharp knives appear, signaling the impending arrival of course 16, we decide to wave the white flag.

Venison is next, we’re told.

“Not for us,” we say politely. “Remember -- we have to save room for dessert.”

“You will have cheese, though, right?” our waiter more pleads than asks.

We agree, and while waiting for it, I ask Rosenblum if -- having written about chocolate and olives and, in his 2000 book “A Goose in Toulouse,” French food in general -- he might consider a book on cheese.

“No,” he says immediately. “There’s no passion in cheese.”

I start to disagree, but he waves me to silence.

“There aren’t really any cheese wars,” he says. “Nothing like Hershey’s versus Mars or Amedei versus Valrhona. I like blood in my books.”

Rosenblum’s account of the “candy war” between Mars and Hershey takes up several pages in Chapter 5, in which he says, “Hershey’s chocolate tastes like sugared wax, the end result of monster mass production with all corners cut.”

Rosenblum isn’t any more favorably disposed toward Mars’ chocolate, so I ultimately found his account of the Hershey-Mars battle somewhat less riveting than his report on the struggle between French-based Valrhona, which he says makes the best chocolate in the world, and the Italian firm of Amedei.

As he tells the tale, the people who run Valrhona are appallingly arrogant and secretive.

“Valrhona is the living exception to ‘Rosenblum’s First Law of Chocolate,’ ” he says. That law is, “The more someone refuses to talk about what he does, the more he is likely to be involved in a lousy product. Applying the converse of this law, I resolved to look for people who were happy to talk about what they did.”

But because Rosenblum -- and many he interviewed in the chocolate industry -- think Valrhona is the best, he felt compelled to research the company thoroughly, visit its factory and talk to everyone he could who knew anything about it.

In the course of that research, he came across “an affable Italian perfectionist named Alessio Tessieri,” who wanted to use Valrhona chocolate in a business that he and his sister and mother ran selling ingredients to bakers in Italy.

When the family visited the Valrhona factory, they were summarily dismissed.

“They told us that they did not think Italians were ready for their products, and they were not sure we could do them justice,” Alessio’s sister Cecilia later told Rosenblum. “Right then and there, it was war.”

The family pooled all its resources and started Amedei.

Alessio traveled the world looking for the best cacao beans, knowing that the best beans make the best chocolate. “And he knew how to hit Valrhona where it hurt,” Rosenblum says. “He zeroed in on the tiny, centuries-old Venezuelan coastal village of Chuao.... Among the cacao cognoscenti, Chuao was referred to with the same reverence that wine lovers lavish on Romanee-Conti.”

For many years, the small growers of Chuao had sold most of their beans to Valrhona. Then, in 2002 -- 10 years after his family was slighted by Valrhona -- Alessio persuaded them to sell their beans to him instead.

How did he do it? Each side tells a different story, and it’s such tales that make Rosenblum’s book a delightful read.

At one point in our Spago dinner, he tells me, “I originally thought of the book as ‘Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,’ and I wound up in ‘War and Peace.’ ”

As we move closer to dessert, mixing talk of chocolate with talk of journalism, politics, wives and wars, I ask Rosenblum about his various chocolate preferences.

Since he has told me Valrhona makes the best chocolate, I ask who takes that chocolate and turns out the best -- whatever you call them -- bonbons or filled chocolates or whatever.

He reaches into the backpack he’s carrying and hands me a 3-inch-by-3-inch gray box bearing the words “Jacques Genin” and “Paris.”

“If I could take only one chocolate to a desert island, it would be his,” he says. “He doesn’t even have a real shop, just a small lab on the Rue Saint-Charles.” He pauses. “Of course, he uses Valrhona.”

I ask if I could buy Genin’s chocolate the next time I go to Paris, and Rosenblum snorts. “If you can find him and if he’s in a good mood.”

Then he hands me a second, even smaller gray box, wrapped with a black ribbon that says “Recchiuti Confections.”

“He’s in Burlingame, near SFO [the San Francisco Airport], and he makes the best chocolates in the United States. Most American chocolates are too sweet.... The rule in the U.S. with almost everything is ‘If a little is good, more is better,’ so they use too much sugar. The trick to making good chocolate is to be subtle. That’s why the French, who are relative latecomers to chocolate-making, now make the best chocolate in the world. They understand the secret of subtle blending.”

Michael Recchiuti gets his chocolate from the Caribbean and Central and South America. “His best product is made with chocolate from Sur del Lago, below Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, where the best chocolate comes from,” Rosenblum says.

Two minutes later, the always ebullient Sherry Yard bounces up to our table. She spots the Recchiuti box immediately and begins expostulating on how great his chocolates are. For the next 20 minutes, she and Rosenblum engage in high-spirited, high-level chocolate talk, nodding and yelping and waving their arms and tossing back and forth names like “Manjari,” “Guittard,” “criollo,” “Guanaja” and “Jivara.” To my unschooled ear, they might as well be speaking Urdu. But their shared passion for great chocolate and their agreement on who (and what) makes great chocolate is clear, even to me.

Then it’s showtime. Yard sends out five chocolate desserts, each more delicious and more beautiful than the next.

We have profiteroles; milk chocolate caramel truffles; a small, 24-layer chocolate torte; a chocolate-banana souffle; and what Yard calls a “Manhattan,” in which, she says, “paper-thin Guittard, Etienne Collection, Lever du Soleil, 61% chocolate is molded into a narrow chocolate tower. The same chocolate, studded with deep, dark chocolate genoise, is used to create mousse that fills the tower, which is then topped with pistachio gelato.”

It’s one of the richest, most flavorful desserts I’ve ever had.

“Mort de chocolat,” I say -- cleverly, I think -- to Mort Rosenblum. But he appears not to hear me. He’s too busy eating and muttering, “This is good. This is great. This is amazing. She’s really good.”

In time, sated, I pay the check and reach for my small boxes of Genin and Recchiuti chocolates. Rosenblum puts a cautionary hand on my arm.

“Don’t eat them now,” he says. “You won’t be able to appreciate them. Do it first thing in the morning, with a clean palate and an empty stomach -- before coffee.”

Bien sur, mon ami.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a better breakfast.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.