Death is Semisweet by Lou Jane Temple Read Free Book Online

her arm around her friend’s shoulder. “Are you saying you trust my judgment?”
    Bonnie signaled the bartender for another beer. “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said with a little grin.

Choc-O-Rama Brownies
    8 oz. semisweet baking chocolate
    2 sticks butter (1 cup)
    ¾ cup cocoa
    2 cups brown sugar
    1 egg
    1 tsp. vanilla
    1 ¼ cups flour
    ¼ tsp. salt
    Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8- or 9-inch baking pan. In a double boiler or bain marie, melt the baking chocolate. In another saucepan, melt the butter. Combine cocoa and brown sugar, and stir in the melted butter. Beat in egg and vanilla.
    Add the melted chocolate. Stir in the flour and salt and beat until smooth. Pour mixture into the pan and bake for 45 minutes or until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cool before cutting. Thanks to my friend and fellow food writer, Charles Ferruza, for the recipe.

Four
    T ry to pay attention and don’t ask too many questions until the end,” Stephanie said.
    “About what we’re doing or about chocolate in general?” Heaven asked as she stirred some chocolate that was melting in the top of a double boiler set on a Bunsen burner-like affair.
    “Didn’t you just ask me to give you a brief history of chocolate?” Stephanie snapped, like a third-grade schoolteacher reprimanding a child who wasn’t sitting still.
    Heaven’s eyes widened. “Yes, Mrs. Simpson.”
    “Okay, then. Don’t hold me to any of this exactly. I had no idea that people would want me to come to their schools and gourmet groups and talk about chocolate but they do. So I’ve had to study up, although I know what they really want are the free samples at the end of the talk.”
    “Enough with the disclaimers. I’m not going to go over to Foster’s Chocolates and tell them Stephanie saidyou put wax in your chocolates. This is just for me. So, I do have enough sense to know chocolate came from the New World, as they call us over here. Mexico?”
    “That’s where the European adventurers found it. And who said anything about stupid old Foster’s? I don’t mention them in my speeches, just for spite. But back to Mexico. There’s a great reference to that in one of my chocolate books. It’s from a letter written by one of Cortez’s soldiers. He said the Aztec emperor Montezuma drank fifty cups of chocolate a day out of golden goblets, said it was an aphrodisiac.”
    “Something I’ve never really understood,” Heaven admitted.
    Stephanie looked over slyly. “Maybe you just haven’t had the right combination of chocolate and—”
    Heaven cut in hurriedly. “Let’s keep on with the history lesson. Montezuma drank a lot of chocolate. The evil white guy plunderers from Europe took it back home with them. Then what?”
    “I should mention that it probably originated in South America, just like the tomato. But they both got ‘discovered’ when they were cultivated in Mexico. The Indians of Mexico were obviously very evolved, cuisine-wise. Chocolate was used by both the Olmecs and the Mayans before the Aztecs. But the names ‘chocolate’ and ‘cocoa’ are both derived from Aztec. ‘Cocoa’ meant the tree it grew on and ‘chocolate’ meant bitter water. And it sure would be, bitter I mean, if you drank the stuff straight like Montezuma did.”
    “I think my chocolate is melted,” Heaven said, looking down at her bowl.
    “Throw in that piece of butter beside you and keep stirring,” Stephanie instructed. “So for the first hundred years or so, chocolate was just a drink in Europe, nobaked goods, no candy. They added stuff to it, ground nuts and sugar and cinnamon, to flavor the drink, but no one made candy with it until they learned how to process it better.”
    “And when did that happen?” Heaven asked, wondering when she could steer the conversation to Foster’s again. She’d been shut down in her first attempt.
    “Eighteen twenty-eight,” Stephanie said, proud of knowing the exact year.
    Shit,