Guest Author - Deborah Markus

Robert Steinberg isn't a name most chocolate lovers will recognize out of context. If it hadn't been for the headline "Scharffen Berger Chocolate Co-founder," I'd never have known that the newspaper article in front of me was reporting the death of someone I knew anything about.

I never met Steinberg. As I said, I didn't even recognize his name. But his writing, far more than any recipes, was what made me buy my own copy of The Essence of Chocolate, the big beautiful Scharffen Berger cookbook, when our local library had a perfectly good copy. Steinberg's story and his modest but determined voice caught my attention.

At the time I was reading the book to review for a column here, all I knew was that Scharffen Berger made chocolate so strong and vivid that my dull American palate rejected it as painfully harsh. In fact, in a book of my own I was working on at the time -- a chocolate diary -- I wrote that, for me at least, "eating their chocolate ranks, in terms of sensual experiences, right up there with having a level-three sinus infection."

My taste has improved, thanks in large part to Scharffen Berger. I now find eating their chocolate a sensual experience right up there with a kiss in the rain, a perfectly ripe peach, or a hot bubble bath on a cold day.

That chocolate wouldn't have existed without Robert Steinberg, who died (according to the Los Angeles Times obituary) on September 17, 2008. When I read that, I felt a twinge of guilt. I knew he'd been ill, from his own writing; but from the work he'd done, and the continuing of his life long past the ten years he'd been given an even chance of surviving, I'd thought that maybe some miracle had happened. He must be well. Or maybe the cancer diagnosis had been a mistake.

It hadn't -- as Steinberg, a doctor before he became a chocolatier, would certainly have known. His illness was exactly what had eventually prompted him to become a chocolate maker in the first place.

Nothing in his past had whispered that he'd grow up to put America on the gourmet chocolate map. According to the Times' obituary, his father was a psychologist, his mother an elementary school teacher. He himself graduated from Harvard, having majored in English literature, before going on to earn a medical degree at the University of Connecticut. He makes casual reference in the Scharffen Berger book to speaking several languages, and when he learned that he had cancer, he sold his medical practice and began writing and taking piano and life drawing lessons.

Yet something about the challenge of making chocolate -- the kind of chocolate that wasn't being made in America at that time -- caught him and didn't let go. He had, he confessed, an "intense interest in food and cooking" as well as a background in, as he modestly describes it, "basic science."

A friend of his had enrolled in an industrial chocolate-making course, but was stymied by the science side of the work. He handed Steinberg his six-hundred-page textbook; and Steinberg, instead of running screaming into the night as any sane person would, was charmed and intrigued.

Obviously there's a lot more to the story than that. Steinberg's own writing tells that, in the book that is worth reading as much for the writing itself as the recipes.

I'll only add that Steinberg helped start a company that was the first in America whose products proudly announced their cacao count right on the front of the wrapper; that his writing is as good as his chocolate; and that he lived for almost twenty years after being diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

His name may not be on the label, but it's his work you're tasting.