Gourmet's Sweets

Book excerpt: This is the most mouthwatering book you will ever read. Why? Because we are all, secretly or openly, obsessed with sweet things. From the very earliest human societies - there is evidence that Neolithic people made sweets - to the present day, there is nothing more likely to get your juices flowing than a sweet.Tim Richardson's extraordinary research has taken in the whole world and all of history. So we read that the Aztecs mixed chocolate with blood in sweet libations to their gods, Saladin entertained Richard the Lionheart with exotic sherbets and sugared jellies in 1191, Victorian sweet magnates built the towns of Bournville and Hersheyville as special housing for those who make sweets, and today we discover that the production of sweets is an extremely high-tech industry shrouded in the kind of secrecy which would make Willy Wonka blush. Tim Richardson has lovingly unearthed a treasure trove of information and brilliantly combined it in a book which, like a box of chocolates, can be dipped into, or just scoffed whole...