Customer Reviews

Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage

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This is indeed a remarkable collection. As the editors stated, "much of the chocolate story has been told elsewhere" and the impressive historical research that went into this book does not attempt to make an encyclopedic sweep of the subject. For example, while you will find a ten page, well-illustrated article on "California's Chocolate History" with 80 footnotes, you will find just over a paragraph on Milton W. Hershey although one of the primary objectives of the study that produced this book was to "determine historical patterns of introduction and dispersal of chocolate products throughout North America." There are two references to the largest chocolate and coco maker in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, Stollwerck Brothers, ( Stolwerck's (sic) in the index). One is a sentence about a chocolate trade card and later a paragraph is included the Stollwerck pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Stollwerck, according to a biographer of H J Heinz, "made chocolate like the Krupp steelworks made steel." Among the innovations Heinz and others were to emulate in America were a focus on the purity of the product from source to sales, niche marketing, and reliance on steam-powered machinery. While one of the book's objectives, to "identify the development and evolution of chocolate-related technology in North America," it is best to keep in mind that this important collection of essays sheds light on disparate, fascinating topics, but cannot survey the amazing story of chocolate, in all its "history, culture and heritage."

This book is written by so many authors from all kind of writers from the University as well as from the Companies.
It is well compiled and nicely arranged in a very thick book!
I would like to congratulate the authors(all of them)especially the editors by building a big Team!
I consider this book is the only historical book on `chocolate which can be used in the industry as well as in the public library !