The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper

“It’s that sort of really sensuous experience” that’s the hallmark of chocolate.īut chocolate’s history hasn’t always been sweet.

“It is the sexiest thing you’ve ever put in your mouth,” she says. That manuscript inspired Rossetto Kasper to create a drink she calls “The Duke’s Hot Chocolate.” That processed cacao was flavored with a variety of substances, from vanilla beans and black pepper to jasmine flowers, and was made into drinks hot and cold or turned into sorbet. It was a manuscript out of Bologna and it was from 1662.” I came across one of the first records in Italy of processing the cacao bean, of making chocolate. “Just by happenstance, when I was researching my first book. If you look at the beginnings in the Americas, it was tied in with religion it was considered currency in some parts of the Americas it was the drink of nobility it was looked upon with great suspicion when it was taken over to Europe, then of course, everybody fell in love with it,” she says. “It’s one of those subjects that really can really take so many different approaches. “Chocolate and good gin is a really good combination.”Ĭhocolate has so many fascinating facets, Rossetto Kasper could spin off in several directions for her lecture. We were both so busy, we would meet around midnight at the kitchen table with a small libation, nibbling on chocolate, tasting as we were gossiping. Paul, Minn., just up the hill from the American Public Media studio where her show is broadcast.

“I knew Julia at different points in our lives, where they intertwined,” says Rossetto Kasper, a New York native who now lives with her husband in St. She’s still refining her lecture for her appearance in the Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre’s “The Art of Chocolate” production March 31, 2012, at the Hotel at Kirkwood in Cedar Rapids.(see related story)īut chocolate will be the theme, with perhaps a few glimpses of the time she spent with Julia Child, subject of the one-act opera, “Bon Appetit,” also on the evening’s menu. It satiates like few other things, because of the fat in it. You can’t eat a lot of that - it just doesn’t work that way. Every night I let half an ounce slowly melt on my tongue. “It can be healthy for the heart and in small quantities, it’s really satisfying. “People realize it can be very healthy,” says Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of “The Splendid Table” cooking show on public radio since 1995.

Once considered diet Kryptonite, chocolate is now in vogue.

The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper