GROWING UP ON THE CHOCOLATE DIET: A Memoir with Recipes

If you thought no one could possibly come up with a brasher chocolate-book gimmick, you didn't know Brody--who runs annual chocolate-orgy seminars for SRO audiences in the Catskills and on the Queen Elizabeth II. For the ""diet"" of the title read ""regimen"": the true believer's no-holds-barred, all-stops-pulled-out, full-throttle chocoholic regimen. Brody races nimbly through her eating and cooking career from cradle (Mom's chocolate cream pie and Nabisco chocolate wafer ice cream roll lighting up the gastronomic wasteland of 1950s-suburbia glop), adolescence, and courtship (future mother-in-law's sour cream layer cake) to motherhood (""Chocolate Initiation Cake"" for her firstborn's first birthday) and unfolding career as caterer, executive dining-room chef, patissier, and food consultant. It's all carried off in a yakkety-yak style sprightly enough to sweeten the whole notion. (""We arrived during cockroach jamboree week, but that wan't too much of a problem because we had forgotten to buy light bulbs."" ""I'd be a born hostess if I didn't have so much trouble remembering people's names."") Most people, of course, will head straight for the recipes, which are mainly for ultra-rich cakes and brownies or ultra-elegant fantasies of meringue/spongecake/buttercream/praline/marzipan, and which embody a firm belief that--to paraphrase Mark Twain on whisky--too much of anything is bad, but too much chocolate is just enough. The book (need it be said) is for those who share that belief.