{buybutton id=5371/}Chocolate.
The word alone evokes strong sense memories. Coming in from the cold to hot cocoa with marshmallows. Christmas stockings lumpy with Hershey’s Kisses. The chocolate cake Mom baked every year for Dad on his birthday. Slumber party fudge consumed by the ton. The first time I bit into a Parisian truffle and thought I’d died and gone to heaven. The rapture of my first bite at La Foret, in Napa Valley.
Love of chocolate was what inspired Such Devoted Sisters, the novel I penned after wondering what I could possibly write to follow up my first novel, Garden of Lies, which was a New York Times bestseller. Write what you know—that’s what I kept coming back to. The theme of tangled sister relationships came from growing up one of five sisters. My sisters and I squabbled, teased one another mercilessly, played endless games of Monopoly and staged musical productions written and directed by me. We also collectively baked loads of cookies and brownies. Those were the best times: when we had our aprons on, banging around the kitchen on Saturdays and filling it with delicious scents. I figured I couldn’t go wrong combining the two: sisters and sweets, in the form of chocolate for the purposes of my story.
Oh, the fun I had researching! I visited boutique chocolate shops and factories on two continents, watched and learned what goes into the making of gourmet chocolates and the meaning of such terms as “liquor milling,” “cocoa pressing” and “conching.” I sampled my way out a dress size and onto a treadmill.
It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.
I was given a private tour, by Monsieur Linxe himself, of the original La Maison du Chocolate on Rue de St. Honore in Paris. Back then, his chocolates were made on the premises, so down a steep set of stairs we went to the basement kitchen, where copper cauldrons of ganache infused with exotic flavors were being stirred on the stove by white-jacketed workers, to be poured over an old, repurposed door in the center of the room to cool. The cooled ganache would then be cut into squares. Imagine it: a door-sized slab of chocolate and your tour guide hacking pieces from it for you to taste. That was when I decided I had the world’s best job. One that allowed me to eat chocolate, guilt-free, in the name of research.
I also had fun visiting the Li-Lac chocolate shop and factory in New York City, where I live. A family-owned business, established in the 1920’s, it’s catered to the sweet tooth of generations of New Yorkers and offers specialty chocolate for every occasion or persuasion. Where else can you get a chocolate typewriter?
What I remember best about that visit, aside from the mind-boggling array of taste treats and loving care with which they’re made, were the two elderly women on the line who’d been dipping chocolates for three decades. They were cheerful and in no hurry to retire.
Back at my desk, dividing my time between the treadmill and my keyboard, I wroteSuch Devoted Sisters, titled after the Irving Berlin song from White Christmas. Dipped and infused, is how I would describe it. A story rich in entangled relationships, coated in chocolate and spiced with flavors, some with nuts (both of the family and tree variety). Twenty some years later, it still delights, judging from the many comments I’ve received from readers the world over. Just last weekend, an older woman approached me at a Broadway matinee during intermission. “Are you the author, Eileen Goudge?” she asked. I confirmed I was indeed, and she explained that she’d recognized me from the photo on the book jacket of her favorite novel of mine, one she’d read and reread more than once. The novel was Such Devoted Sisters.
Warning: Do not read without chocolate on hand. This can lead to extreme behavior such as begging on doorsteps of perfect strangers late at night or bouts of hysterical weeping outside shuttered storefronts.