Death by Chocolate is a marketing term for various desserts that feature chocolate (especially dark chocolate or cocoa) as the primary ingredient. The trademark in the United States was owned by S&A Restaurant Group, the parent company of Bennigan's restaurants, but with the subsequent bankruptcy of the company the current legal status is unclear. In the United Kingdom and European Union, the registered trade mark rights belong to F.T. Wood & Sons Limited. Nevertheless, unlicensed uses of the term are common.
In the late 1970s, several restaurants in the Cleveland, Ohio, area offered a "Death by Chocolate" dessert in response to the demand created by the mention of a fictional dish of the same name on Linn Sheldon's Barnaby & Friends children's television show on WUAB. This usually consisted of chocolate cake, chocolate ice cream, chocolate brownies and chocolate syrup layered in a tall parfait glass.
In 1981 Jeffrey Fields opened a restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway in Los Angeles called Les Anges. He and his French Pastry Chef, Claude Koeberle, invented a chocolate cake that they called "la Mort au Chocolat", translated as "Death by Chocolate" and "Chocolate Death". It was on the menu on opening day and remained very popular throughout the life of the restaurant. Reference to the dessert first appeared in a Los Angeles Times review, by critic Lois Dwan, on 13 September 1981. Subsequent mentions appeared in a January 1982 Travel & Leisure column by Sharon Boorstin, an October 1982 review of Les Anges in Gourmet Magazine, by Caroline Bates, and a feature in the Premier Issue of Chocolatier Magazine in 1984.
The original Les Anges creation included multiple layers of chocolate genoise, mousse, ganache, and meringue. It was dressed with chocolate crème anglaise.
The term was coined by Erik Russell in 1984 whilst working for London-based dessert manufacturer, Kaysens. On tasting the sample for a proposed new chocolate product he exclaimed, "This one's death by chocolate".
A dish called "Death by Chocolate" might be:
- A layered chocolate cake, with fudge, ganache, or chocolate mousse between the layers
- A dessert made in a trifle bowl from alternating layers of broken-up Kahlúa-soaked brownies, chocolate mousse, crushed Heath bars, and whipped topping
- A molten chocolate cake
- A flourless chocolate cake (sometimes called "chocolate decadence")
"Death by Chocolate" is also the name of an ice cream flavour. In the ice cream, there is usually chocolate fudge, chocolate chunks and chocolate ice cream.
Chef Marcel Desaulniers wrote a book, Death by Chocolate, on the theme. Subsequent other books in the series had similar names.
The Scottish band Simple Minds wrote a song called "Death by Chocolate," as did Australian singer Sia Furler.
Famous quotes containing the words death and/or chocolate:
“This death was his belief though death is a stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)