Past Newsletters
Vol 5 No 2

In Pursuit of Chocolate

Thank Willie For This One!

You may think you are experiencing the Fourth of July a bit prematurely this year with the explosive taste sensations coming from this month's In Pursuit of Chocolate selection! Chef Willing Howard, of Issimo®, created this outstanding chocolate delight in honor of his son, Willie.

The Williecake® is a flourless chocolate torte - the richest, densest, chocolatiest, award-winning torte we have encountered! It will take a mere sliver to satisfy even the most devoted chocophile. Every one of these fabulous tortes are made entirely by hand, one at a time, from the finest natural ingredients, which include Belgian bittersweet chocolate, Dutch cocoa powder, butter, sugar, rum, and fresh eggs. (Absolutely no preservatives, stabil-izers, emulsifiers, artificial colorants, or added salt are used.) And… Belgian chocolate covers the entire torte! In honor Valentine's Day, your torte is decorated with a 23-carat edible gold heart!

Issimo's tortes are made in the European style, meaning that Chef Willing uses significantly less sugar than most American chocolatiers, and focuses instead on the intensity of the chocolate flavor. We think Howard's Williecake® reinvents chocolate tasting it's definitely aimed at the discriminating connoisseur.

Your torte is scrumptious all by itself or can be served with a pool of raspberry purée, Crème Anglaise, or freshly whipped cream. A few fresh raspberries and a mint sprig make a simple yet elegant garnish. Your Williecake's mouth-watering and complex tastes make it an out-standing choice to serve with espresso, demitasse, and many teas. Of course it's incredibly festive with Champagne!

The Williecake is shipped frozen, overnight delivery to assure optimum quality and freshness. Once delivered, the product has a one-year shelf life when kept frozen, a 12 week refrigerated shelf life, and four to five weeks at room temperature - even without all of those preservatives, stabilizers, and emulsifiers that we see in so many products that don't meet In Pursuit of Chocolate's exceptionally high standards! However, there is no doubt in our minds that yourorte will not sit around long enough to worry about shelf life!

A Slice of Perfection and a Sliver of Background

According to Willing W. Howard, President of Issimo Food Group, Inc.® Issimo's mission is to consistently make products of the absolute highest quality humanly attainable.

Chef Howard has been in the gourmet food business for over 20years, operating two Internationally acclaimed restaurants, a gourmet food retail shop and a high-end restaurant and catering business. He began his career by opening The Pasta Place in La Jolla, California, an upscale Northern Italian specialty gourmet store. After several meta- morphoses, his first restaurant, Issimo®, was launched, and under his constant vigilance became Internationally known and rated as one of the top ten French and Northern Italian restaurants in the United States!

Complement Gourmet Chocolate With Fine Wine

For hundreds of years, pairing the finest gourmet chocolates with International wines has been a common tradition, bringing the extraordinary pleasures of sight, feel, taste, and euphoria to the likes of Queen Isabella and her hero Christopher Columbus, Shake-speare, Napoleon, and even the empress of Russia, Catherine the Great!

Although royal and acclaimed persons knew these pleasures many hundreds of years ago, and chocolate and wine are within many Americans’ budget, most Americans have only tasted factory chocolate, which hardly resembles real chocolate. We offer you the opportunity to taste life as the Royals did. You can enjoy gourmet chocolate in concert with fine wines and educate your palate by subscribing to winemonthclub.com.

In general, your choice of wine, beer, and liquor must be able to stand up to the choco-late you choose. Together they will create a mysterious alchemy. Here are some tips for matching wines, beers and liquors with your In Pursuit of Chocolate selections.

When you are tasting a dark chocolate, a full bodied Zinfandel and a Cabernet Sauvignon are wonderful complements because they are made with more concentrated, ripe fruit. Truffles are often filled with Winter and Summer Cabernets, Merlot, Champagne, Port and Chardonnay, so it follows that these wines will complement your chocolates. Marsala, an often forgotten classic wine, partners well with chocolate. The process of making Marsala includes slowly simmering, unlike most other wines. Both chocolate and Marsala have ‘empyreumatic’ aromas and flavors… the result of heating and roasting.

The European style chocolates (rich and bitter-sweet) go well with an equally rich Cabernet Sauvignon both have a slight bitterness, a roasted flavor, and an earthy quality. The chocolate helps take away some of the astringency and dryness of the wine. Try melding the two to make an extraordinary sauce to add to desserts.

Chocolate desserts that have a hint of bitter-ness can readily be enjoyed with young red wines, wines of the Loire, the Beaujolais and the Bordelais wines.

Gild a warm bittersweet chocolate cake with orange-muscat and serve it with raspberries and port ice cream. Using both muscat and port together is exotic, and your dessert will be unforgettable.

Would you believe chocolate is fast becoming an item to pair with beer! Of course it always was in European cultures, but now because there are so many fine microbrews being made in America, we can also enjoy this outstanding tasting experience. A very dark beer, such as Grant's Imperial Stout, Brooklyn

This legendary holiday that traditionally combines love and chocolate will be right around the corner when you receive our In Pursuit of Chocolate featured selection,
and we thought that all chocolate aficionados would want to be aware of just how Valen-tine's Day came about. Of course there is more than one version here's ours.

In ancient Rome, February 14th was a holiday to honor Juno, the Queen of the Roman Gods and Goddesses… the Romans also knew her as the Goddess of women and marriage. The following day, February 15th, began the Feast of Lupercalia. Ancient Roman culture dictated that young boys and girls should grow up strictly separated. Never-theless, on the eve of the festival of Lupercalia, the names of Roman girls were written on slips of paper and placed into water jars. Each young man would draw a girl's name from the jar and then he and the young lady he chose would be partners for the duration of the festival. No doubt that mysterious power, Fate, dictated the match. Sometimes the pairing lasted an entire year, and often, they would fall in love and would later marry.

Why does there always have to be a bad guy in every story? Under the rule of Emperor Claudius II, Rome was involved in many bloody and detested campaigns. Claudius the Cruel was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military campaigns which he imagined would lead to his GREAT HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE. He believed that the reason was that Roman men did not want to leave their loves or families… makes good sense to us. As a result, Claudius cancelled all marriages and engagements in Rome. Can you even begin to imagine what that must have been like!

As the story goes, during the reign of Claudius the Cruel, two priests named Valentine and Marius were aiding the Christian martyrs and secretly marrying couples. And for these kind deeds, Father Valentine was apprehended and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who then con-demned him to be beaten to death with clubs, and to have his head cut off. (As if that mattered after the first part of his sentence was carried out). He suffered martyrdom on the 14th day of February, in the year 270 AD.

Now remember, that at that time it was the custom in Rome, a very ancient custom, indeed, to celebrate the Feast of Lupercalia in honor of a Heathen God. The priests of the early Christian Church in Rome were making every effort to do away with all pagan elements in this feast, and any other pagan feasts as well. One of their strategies was to substitute the names of Saints for those of goddesses. According to legend, St. Valen-tine left a farewell note for the jailer's daughter, who had become his friend, and signed it, From Your Valentine. We know what you are thinking, but we aren't going there.

Christian priests lobbied to rename the Feast of Lupercalia, Saint Valentine's Day, since Lupercalia began the day after Father Valen-tine's martyrdom. The Christian priests chose his name to celebrate the love that Saint Valentine demonstrated for many others by his noble actions. And in 496 A.D. Pope Gelasius formally set aside February 14th to honor St. Valentine.

What's Chocolate Got To Do With It?

Valentine's Day is a winter celebration of love, named for Father Valentine who died a martyr's death years and years ago. So where's the connection with Valentine's Day and chocolate? Father Valentine died long before chocolate was even known about in all but Aztec cultures. FYI: The Aztec King Montezuma drank liquid chocolate all day to enhance his libido.

The beginnings of our modern Valentine's Day, most likely were in the Middle Ages, in England and France, when it was believed that in the second week of the second month, birds began their mating calls.

In the early days, the French thought choco-late was a barbarous and noxious drug, until the French Court embraced it after the Paris faculty of medicine approved it as a beneficial potion. Pope Pius V considered cocoa liquid so vile tasting that he decreed the drinking of it would not break the com-munion fast back then, most chocolate was consumed, and appreciated in liquid form.

Even if the historical connection between Valentines Day and chocolate cannot be unearthed, it is as sure as the sun sets, that the aphrodisiac qualities of this dark bitter-sweet treat will always drum up the heady, high sensations of being in love. What better confection to give on the day that pays homage to Love?