Stamping Chocolate
When fantasizing about the publication of On the Chocolate Trail, I imagined a chocolatey cover that either would include actual samples or at least might be scratch and sniff. That proved a bit too ambitious, unfortunately.
I do love the look of the final cover, though it only activates one of the senses.
The Belgian postal service produced a set of stamps with chocolate taste and themes on March 25. These appeal not only for their tantalizing images of chocolate chunks, truffles, spread, and sprinkles. Using them has the added value of the taste of chocolate when licked to apply to mail.
To honor the 400th anniversary of the arrival of chocolate in France, the French postal service produced a set of historical stamps in 2009. The images recall the pre-Columbian development of chocolate, the beauty of the cocoa pod, the initial contact by Europeans of chocolate through Columbus and his crew, the use of a chocolate pot and stirrer in colonial period preparation of chocolate, the industrialization of manufacture production, and the significance of Bayonne, France (not New Jersey) in this story. I explore the narrative that Jews brought chocolate to France through Bayonne in On the Chocolate Trail.
In 2001 the Swiss postal service produced these chocolate scented stamps:
So where are the American chocolate stamps?
Recent Posts
-
On the Chocolate Trail in Bariloche, Argentina
In March, Mark and I finally extended our chocolate trail explorations in celebration of our special anniversary to Bariloche…via Miami, Buenos Aires, Ushuaia, Antarctica, and Buenos Aires again. There were international flights, a cruise, a couple of domestic flights to get there. All of the travel was amazing, but Bariloche, sometimes called the chocolate capital
Read more › -
Sunday Yeast Polemics: On the Bread Trail
Leavened bread or not? While some of us may think of Passover, the question applied to Eucharistic bread and created significant division in the early Christian Church. The leavened bread for Sunday use was often baked at home by women. Over time, preferences shifted to clergy, church-produced, breads… and, the Eastern Orthodox Church preferred a
Read more › -
Sweet Treat: Chocolate and the Making of American Jews
You may wonder: how did chocolate help define American Jews? Through chocolate, we see that Jews were part of America since its earliest days. Well, since 1701 at least, Jews in the Colonies made part of their living through chocolate. Several Sephardim, leaders of their New York and Newport Jewish and secular communities, participated in
Read more › -
How About Some Uterus Challah?
When Logan Zinman Gerber felt enraged about the loss of reproductive rights in the U.S., she baked challah. Not any challah. She shaped it into a uterus. It wasn’t long after the birth of her daughter that Gerber, a longtime challah baker and staff member of the Religious Action Center of the Reform movement, considered
Read more ›
Some Previous Posts
(in alphabetical order)
- "Boston Chocolate Party" Q&As with Deborah Kalb
- 2022 Media for The "Boston Chocolate Party"
- A Manhattan synagogue explores the rich, surprising history of Jews and chocolate
- About Rabbi Deborah Prinz
- Baking Prayers into High Holiday Breads
- Boston Chocolate Party
- Digging into Biblical Breads
- Exhibit Opens! Sweet Treat! Chocolate & the Making of American Jews
- For the Easiest Hanukah Doughnuts Ever
- Forthcoming! On the Bread Trail
- Funny Faced Purim Pastries
- Good Riddance Chameitz or, The Polemics of Passover's Leaven
- How About Some Uterus Challah?
- Injera*
- Jewish Heritage Month: Baseball & Chocolate!
- Matzah - But, the Dough Did Rise!
- Plan a Choco-Hanukkah Party: 250th Anniversary Tea Party
- Prayers Into Breads
- To Shape Dough: A Trio of Techniques