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Bittersweet
A Memoir
The Life and Times of the World’s Leading Chocolate Taster
A Memoir
Bittersweet
The Life and Times of the World’s Leading Chocolate Taster
Copyright © 2018 by Angus Kennedy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be sent by e-mail to Apollo Publishers at [email protected].
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas.
Print ISBN: 978-1-948062-04-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948062-11-4
Printed in the United States of America.
contents
Chapter 1: Mad Dogs, Vodka, and Candy
Chapter 2: Candy to the Rescue
Chapter 4: Strange Visitors to Number 22
Chapter 5: Welcome to the World of Confectionery
Chapter 6: The Candy Kid Goes Back to School
Chapter 9: Working in a Mint Factory
Chapter 10: How to Get the Best Job in the World
Chapter 13: What You Might Not Know About Your Chocolate Bar
Chapter 14: Will We Run Out of Chocolate?
Chapter 15: The Chocolate of the Future
Chapter 16: Chocolate Just for the Moment
A Simple Way to Test the Quality of Chocolate
Preface
Okay, I’m not into long lists of thank-yous extended to people neither of us would care to meet.
However, there is one person I should mention: the anesthetist who yesterday put me to sleep for an operation to remove a cyst on my left knee. Yes, he deserves to be on my list of honors. Wow, those anesthetics are amazing. I mean, what is that drug they give you before the one that makes you sleep? You know, the one that says, Hey, Angus, it doesn’t matter if they chop off your entire leg or if chocolate runs out forever—nothing matters!
Just looking into the anesthetist’s face, fully equipped with one dark eyebrow with the curious ability to move on its own, while the other, a light-colored one, remained stationary, was a good start. Watching this facial performance while he proceeded to proudly name all the drugs he was administering as my consciousness drifted into the ether: now that was pretty damned cool.
Angus Kennedy you’re going down.
It was a general anesthetic of course, and I fell asleep the moment I started to lie back and felt the nurse’s hands guide my head. The operation was, I say, almost a success. They found not one, but three “foreign bodies,” which they presented to me in a small blue pot when I woke up (now sent off for analysis), floating around the soft tissues at the back of my knee. Four years of pain are now almost over.
I think I am high from yesterday’s drugs. I must be, and because of that and not being able to stand up, I am here now finishing this book on the couch with a single origin bar of French chocolate handy. (That is also keeping me on the couch!) So we should all thank him, and chocolate of course, and not a boring list of lifeless aunties and distant acquaintances.
I’m a man with five kids, an impossibly busy job in confectionery conferencing and magazines, and never enough time even to escape to the bathroom in the mornings before I have to perform the most intolerable school runs ever in a ten-year-old Land Cruiser. So how was I ever going write a book—another book, even, I asked myself? But once I started, I knew it would be okay. You can’t leave off books when you write them. They’re like plants; they need feeding or they die.
So now I am back home, sitting in the living room over the school holidays with my knee up and trying (rather foolishly) to concentrate with an Xbox on in the background and three overactive
