At present, national and online retailers offer few brands of gianduia to American consumers. Those fortunate enough to live near a good Italian market may have somewhat better options. Though we’ll discuss some of the more common brands shortly, limited and inconsistent availability make it difficult to advise on what to buy. Instead, let’s discuss how to buy (1).
Though we’ve been discussing the earliest gianduiotti, the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought a number of innovations in production, not all of them bad.
Understanding the nature of the cacao solids used in early gianduia requires a brief examination of the state of the art in Turin during the 1860s.
Most efforts to historically contextualize gianduia focus solely on the era of its presumed invention in the mid-1860s. However, as we’ve seen, many components of the gianduia myth first arose in the 1930s, through Cagliano’s article in Il Dolce (1932), Succ. Caffarel Prochet & Co.’s “Gianduia 1865” marketing campaign (1936), and the booklet Il Cioccolato ed il Suo Valore Alimentare (1933). The 1930s witnessed a confluence of factors favorable to increased prominence and production of gianduia—a perfect storm, with Benito Mussolini at the eye.
We now jump forward to the 1930s. It was in this decade, between two World Wars, that the myth of gianduia was defined. Though a number of historical factors converged to elevate gianduia in this period (some of which will be discussed in Part 17), two of the key players were Walter Bächstädt and Paolo Audiberti (1).
