Laura Florand was born in Georgia and eventually moved to Paris, where she met and married her own handsome Frenchman. She is now a lecturer at Duke University and dedicated to her research into French chocolate. Her new series launches in August 2012 with The Chocolate Thief (Kensington).
I often get asked how I could have come up with the idea to write about chocolatiers, as if this is rather quirky. But the more I discover of real top chocolatiers, the more I think--how could I not?
I came to chocolate via chocolate chips and supermarket candy bars the way most American kids do. It wasn't until I lived in Paris as a graduate student that I began to discover top French chocolatiers. Given my meager graduate stipend and that top chocolates even at that time cost $60 or more a pound, my credit card companies were delighted.
So when I decided to write about a chocolate-making hero in The Chocolate Thief, I was following my passion. When I made my first timid research inquiries, I never expected the generosity and enthusiasm with which the world's greatest chocolatiers would share their worlds with me, or that through them that first book idea (The Chocolate Thief) would grow into a series and a novella.
Their worlds are fascinating and incredibly diverse. Michel Chaudun has a laboratoire not much bigger than an SUV, and he filters his enrobing chocolate through pantyhose in between batches, using a hair dryer--yes, a hair dryer!--to loosen it from the grill. Jacques Genin's laboratoire is a huge, luminous space of marble counters above a beautiful salon of exposed rock walls and red velvet curtains. Pâtissier Laurent Jeannin works in a Michelin three-star kitchen where a team of over 100 move in a constant, intense dance.
They, too, are following their passion, and it is that passion and intensity which I try to capture in Sylvain Marquis, the hero of The Chocolate Thief. A person for whom the world is an utterly sensual place--and those senses are in the control of his hands. A person whose success has taken exceptional discipline, drive, creativity, and perfectionism.
Not to mention arrogance or, as Sylvain would prefer to call it, accurate self-assessment. Every single top chocolatier I have ever researched has openly stated to me, at some point during an interview, "I am the best in the world." And every single one, full of that conviction, goes back and pours his soul into being even better. And then offers that soul up to be eaten in one or two delicious bites.
My kind of hero. --Laura Florand