BOUCHERVILLE, Quebec — Macaroons. Chocolate eggs. Candy polar bears, lambs, owls and bunnies. A 3-foot-tall figure from “Lord of the Rings,” constructed all in chocolate.
Let’s talk about those confections and Jeremy Monsel’s stunning artistry in chocolate, not Donald Trump and his Cabinet appointments. It’s not what you expect to read about in a nationally syndicated column that usually treats matters that are not, well, treats.
But that’s the whole point. A Pew Research Center poll taken 16 months before Election Day found that 65% of Americans were exhausted by politics. So let’s change the subject, just for this holiday week, and turn to Monsel, who’s never run for office but is in the running for a world championship — the World Chocolate Masters competition, to be held in Belgium in 2026.
His is a campaign as long as an American presidential election. (Note that sentence carefully. It was written solely to redeem this piece, establishing it as being rooted in politics, which is what the syndicate expects when it distributes this column to editorial-page editors who themselves, I am confident, are looking for a holiday break.)
He’s already been named the top chocolatier in all of North America. This is why his Sponge Bob figure and a bell the size of the Liberty Bell are examples of what can be done with chocolate in the right, sweet-smelling hands.
The 31-year-old protege of Christophe Morel, one of Canada’s greatest chocolatiers himself, is the odds-on favorite in that competition. (Sorry, no polls available. Take my word for it. I’ve tasted this stuff.) He didn’t win the crown three years ago, and so now he is kind of like Richard Nixon looking for a comeback after losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. (Oops. With that comparison, I’m slipping back into bad, bad habits. I can’t help myself, though when Monsel wasn’t looking when I visited with him the other day, I did help myself to a slab of chocolate bark. Magnifique, as Monsel, who speaks very little English, would say, referring to the chocolate, not the surreptitious heist.)
Monsel has been a chocolate man from his earliest days. Born in France, as a young boy he saw a television show about Christophe Michalak, who became World Pastry Champion in 2005. He told his mother that was what he wanted to do, though in chocolate. Like tennis dads and soccer moms, she rallied to the cause.
“She took me to chocolate salons,” he told me. “I asked questions about how they did what they did.”
Eventually Monsel joined Morel here outside Montreal, and it was under Morel’s tutelage that he learned how to do chocolate molds and how to create chocolate statuary. One of his masterpieces — the one that came in second in the last World Championship competition — is a chocolate butterfly, crafted from white, black and orange chocolate transformed into sponge cake and layers of pure chocolate. The result is a metaphor come to life, or at least artistic life: a great metamorphosis made of natural elements. Today it rests at the Academie du Chocolat in Montreal, about 15 miles from where he works, single-handedly creating small batches of craft chocolate items for retail sale.
A Globe and Mail reporter who watched Monsel prepare that butterfly noted how sparse was his workspace and how meticulous was his work:
“He cleaned as he worked, constantly,” she wrote. “He poured warmed milk into a carton of chocolate pieces, then immediately wiped the drops that speckled the counter. He zested a lime, then quickly worked to wipe away any stray green shavings.”
(Now is a good time for an aside to say that, though I have written about Hubert Humphrey, who practiced what he called the “politics of joy,” and about Kamala Harris, who described her presidential campaign as an exercise in “joy,” I have never as a political columnist had the occasion to use the word “zest” as a verb. In a career I have enjoyed immensely, some joys simply have been beyond my grasp.)
Now back to the chocolate butterfly. Monsel practiced nearly every day for a year to be able to create it in 2021 in the eight hours the contest rules allow. He’ll start to practice in January for the world championships more than a year later.
One of the jurors of the competition, the famed French pastry chef Amaury Guichon, once created a 6-foot-tall Empire State Building in chocolate, adding a King Kong figure for good measure — a sculpture that required 135 pounds of chocolate. It remains one of the towering achievements of the chocolate craft. I asked Monsel what he planned for the big competition.
“A surprise,” he said.
But once he finalizes his decision, he will enlist a team to help him prepare. In Belgium, members of that team won’t be able to touch his work. In Boucherville, they can advise him.
With concerns about cocoa farming — the World Wildlife Fund reports that cocoa farmers are responsible for massive deforestation in West Africa, with as much as 70 percent of the illegally deforested land in Ivory Coast related to the practice — competitors like Monsel use expired product.
Here is what I learned in Monsel’s factory, which is more like an artist’s studio than a General Motors automobile-manufacturing plant:
Milk chocolate has more fat than dark chocolate, so it’s easier to mold. In the unlikely event you’re planning to make a chocolate sculpture, it’s best to use dark chocolate for the inside, because it is denser. It’s OK to put your finger in a fountain of chocolate in Quebec because it is beyond the reach of Washington regulators. Licking the bowl is probably off-limits. (I wanted to indulge that time-honored tradition — you would, too — but restrained myself, mostly because my wife was watching and I didn’t want to get yelled at in the car on the way home.)
Now the question top of mind for everyone who has ever worked in a doughnut shop or an ice cream parlor:
Monsel, does all this chocolate in this environment — in these rooms where the aroma of chocolate prevails like the mist of a rain forest — rob you of the desire to eat chocolate?
He thought for just a second and then answered. “Actually,” he said, “I eat it all the time.”
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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