Neil Davey
The Bluffer’s Guide To Chocolate is a rudimentary knowledge of food which is no longer socially acceptable. Not so long ago, your career, house and relationship gave you bragging rights at dinner parties. Now it’s your insider knowledge of delis in Tuscan villages, tapas bars in obscure Spanish towns, artisanal craft beers that are only available in Portland, the relative merits of Brazilian coffee beans over these Fairtrade Ecuadorean ones… You get the picture. The sheer variety of chocolate available means it’s the perfect subject to drop into such conversations, however before you do, you need a certain amount of knowledge at your fingertips. You could eat your way through thousands of pounds of chocolate – in terms of cost and weight – and take your waistline to breaking point. Or you could buy the Bluffer’s Guide to Chocolate and spare your bank account and bathroom scales. Actually, given the current food paranoia, we should perhaps stick “Sugar Free” and “Zero Calories” stickers on the cover…
Alternatively, you can look at it as a concise, meticulously researched reference book with added silly jokes and comic asides.
When did you passion for chocolate begin?
I’d need to check with my mum, but I suspect it’s when my first teeth came through. It’s a romance that’s now in its fifth decade, from the cult bars and barely remembered treats of my youth –I’d happily wrestle anyone this second for a Pink Panther or an Amazin’ Raisin – to the more sophisticated bars available today and, of course, the odd guilty pleasure. Believe me I was as happy as anyone when the Wispa got its revival. Now if we can just get them to bring back Fuse…
Chocolate helped make me the man I am today. Ahem. As I always say, I only get offended if people refer to the paunch as a “beer belly” because there’s a lot more time, effort and money gone into this than just beer, I can tell you.
At what point did you discover that there was enough to warrant a book about the sweet treat?
I wrote a piece on Food Myths for MSN and the brilliant Paul A Young gave me some information about the various myths that have built up around chocolate, such as “70% dark chocolate is the best”. Some 70% chocolate is great but the percentage of cocoa solids is not the whole story. After all, nobody ever asks what the other 30% is made of, do they? For all they know it could be rendered beef fat, broken glass, Styrofoam and woodchips. Writing that piece, I realised I didn’t know the history of chocolate or the specifics of how it’s made and when I started to look into it, I discovered this wealth of information and fascinating facts, not to mention the sheer alchemy by which a cacao pod eventually becomes a bar of Galaxy.
Please tell us about your research process to put the book together.
Do you mean “was there eating?”? Well, yes, but not as much as you might expect. There was a lot of reading – there are some excellent, serious chocolate tomes out there, such as Chocolate by Sarah Jayne-Stanes and Chocolate Unwrapped by Sarah Jane Evans. I observed chocolate makers, talked to people in the industry… I even picked a pod off a cacao tree in St Lucia and tried the fruit that surrounds the seeds. That was quite an experience.
Who is the most memorable famous person you have interviewed?
For bad reasons? Kelly Brook. But I won’t get into that here. For embarrassing reasons? Michelle Pfeiffer. She smiled at me and I genuinely lost the ability to speak for about 20 minutes: she has pure, A grade star quality, the likes of which I’d not seen before or since. Fortunately there were other journalists in the room so my incoherence hopefully went undetected.
Several of my favourite interviews have been older musicians. Joe Walsh from The Eagles was one of the most open and engaging people I’ve ever met, and John Densmore, The Doors’ drummer, performed a brief rendition of “The End”, using the arm of his chair as an impromptu drum kit: that was a serious goose-bumpy moment.
Jackie Mason was amazing – I asked him one question and he talked, brilliantly and hilariously, for almost an hour. Richard O’Brien was fascinating. Gillian Anderson was challenging but once she opens up is funny as hell and utterly brilliant. And I can’t not mention Martin Sheen, who turned what should have been a 20 minute interview into a 45 minute monologue involving Apocalypse Now stories aplenty and a superb Marlon Brando impersonation. All of that and he signed our West Wing box set with a Presidential quote. That was a good afternoon.
Please tell us a bit about your blog.
As hinted above and by the book, I like food. As in I REALLY like food. More than that though, I like the people who work in food. The film publicity thing now can be a soul-destroying machine – you’re lucky if you get six minutes with the talent – but food people have an energy that’s really engaging to be around: let’s face it, nobody started making cheese because they wanted fame, money and girls, did they?
I got a little taste of the food business at my first editorial job and when that magazine – the late lamented Footloose – went under, I wanted to keep that connection going. I wrote for a couple of restaurant websites on and off, worked as a cheesemonger for a year and then, when a subsequent project fell apart, a friend suggested I should start a blog. Initially it was going to be a combination of film stuff and food – hence the blog and Twitter names – but it rapidly became all about the eating and, to a pretty hefty extent, helped me redefine myself as a food and travel writer.
Why do you like to specialise in all things to do with sitting down?
Some people are built for bungee jumping and abseiling down The Shard. I’m built for comfort and waxing lyrical about cheese. In both cases we’re possibly shortening our lives but hey…
Much has written about how tasty fat is. My consoling thought is that, should I ever be in a plane crash in The Andes, my fellow passengers will, at least, discover that I’m utterly delicious.
What is next for you?
My second book, The Bluffer’s Guide to Food, is out in April. There’s more travel in the offing – a soul food tour of South Carolina and the Southern States looks to be the next big trip – and I’m working on a big barbecue feature for delicious magazine at the moment. And, actually, despite all the jokes, I am spending quite a lot of time in the gym these days… if only to balance out all the above.