Mr. Greg Cox, senior food editor and critic for Raleigh, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper made the following remarks in his food column on February 7, 2007:

"Say your lover has a chocolate fetish? Then get thee to Azurelise...These are not your typical prettified confections with icing squiggles and candied flowers on top, mind you. They're truffles for the purist, unadorned squares of chocolate that let their flavor do the talking."  

Mr. Cox is North Carolina's most widely read and influential food critic. It is especially important, therefore, that I acquit myself of his allegation that I make Azurelise chocolate truffles for chocolate truffle "purists". 

Granted, my chocolate truffles are "unadorned" and, by most accounts, they let their "flavor do the talking". I do not dispute that these are two traits purists want to see and covet in their chocolate truffles.  However, that does not prove, as Mr. Cox insinuates, that I am a chocolate truffle elitist. There is, as there always must be, another explanation.

As a child I developed a certain fear of pretty chocolate truffles with exotic names. I expected them to taste weird because they almost always did. Plain looking chocolate truffles with plain names, like the ones I now make, usually tasted at least OK and I was not afraid of them.

Naturally, I wondered why there should be such a regular correspondence between how chocolate truffles look and are named and how they taste. I eventually reached this two part conclusion: (A) People who prettify chocolate truffles do not know how to make them taste good, and (B) People who make good tasting chocolate truffles do not know how to prettify them 

Later life experiences confirmed my childhood generalization about the relation between how chocolate truffles look and are named and how they taste; and I found no good reasons to reject my precocious explanation of why the generalization is so reliable. 

Therefore, when I decided to start making chocolate truffles I took it as a good sign that I had no skill whatsoever decorating things. I knew that any chocolate truffles I made would turn out at best plain looking and that this meant they probably would taste at least OK, so long as I was careful how I named them. 

I was right. Here is how one Azurelise chocolate truffle aficionado recently described what happens for her when she eats an Azurelise chocolate truffle:

"The crisp chocolate shell melts slowly and lusciously; the creamy smooth filling presents a medley of intense flavors that deepen and heighten the lingering impression the shell makes; the shell and filling flavors blend to yield a perfectly harmonized, remarkably long lasting and deeply satisfying chocolate taste experience."

That testimony should make it clear that I make Azurelise chocolate truffles for the lovers Mr. Cox mentions in the first line of his review, not for the purists who come later. And, as I have said, this is due to my having no skill whatsoever at making "prettified" chocolate truffles, not to my being an elitist. 

Reginald O. Savage

Azurelise Gourmet Chocolate Truffles