My mother bequeathed to me many things including shares of Apple I foolishly sold a couple of months after I received them, thinking the stock couldn’t possibly go up another penny. It has more than quadrupled since then.
She also left me a huge secretary. No, not an overfed Girl Friday, a seven-foot-tall piece of burled walnut furniture consisting of glass-enclosed bookcases atop a pull-down desk atop a chest of drawers. I tell visitors it has been in the family for generations.The truth is, mom bought it at an antique store sometime in the 1960s and I remember sitting in the car for hours listening to the radio as she was inside the shop, haggling with the dealer. Having come of age during the Depression, Mom never paid the asking price for anything. By the time she was finished negotiating, anyone unfortunate enough to think he could earn a profit on anything he sold Ruby Dryden was more than happy to sell it to her for a pittance so he could get rid of her and take a couple of aspirins and/or stiff drinks and lie down. But I digress.
Of all the things mom left me, perhaps the rarest and most valuable is her chocolate pie recipe which I insisted she write down as she made one for my birthday — I always chose pie over cake — during a visit to our Connecticut home twenty-some years ago. Mom was an old-fashioned cook. She didn’t use written recipes, she kept them in her head. I knew that, someday, when she was gone, my all-time favorite chocolate pie recipe would be too, which is why I had her write it down.
I’ve been thinking about that recipe all week. Last weekend I attended a cookout at my niece Marilyn’s house in Ohio, where I was visiting my brother and sister-in-law who live nearby. Marilyn asked her mother, Nancy, to bring a pie. Knowing I love chocolate pie, Nancy ordered one from a local gourmet market. A few hours later Marilyn called back and said she wanted a peach pie, so Nancy called a Dayton pie shop to order a second pie. The bakery informed her they didn’t take orders but assured her there would be a peach pie if someone showed up at 7 a.m. the next morning when they opened, but warned that, if we got there a few minutes after 7, it would likely be gone. Because we Drydens take our pie seriously, I set my alarm for 6:30 and was standing outside the door by 6:55. I was the only customer in sight. “You must love peach pie,” the clerk said, as she placed the pie in a box and sealed it with a sticker with the bakery’s logo. “I hate peach pie,”I told her truthfully. The only fruit I’ve ever consumed has been served in the form of a pie and peach ranks right down near the bottom of the pie spectrum in my book, just above pumpkin, rhubarb and gooseberry.
When dessert time rolled around, I ignored the peach pie but cut myself a generous slab of the chocolate which, I had to admit, was darn near as good as mom’s, but not quite. For starters, it was a chocolate cream pie. Mom never topped her pies with whipped cream. She always topped the pies I preferred — lemon, chocolate and butterscotch — with meringue. I consider a golden brown sky-high meringue as essential to a perfect pie as the filling and the crust.
This morning, I dug out mom’s recipe and decided to give it a go.
This is the first time I’ve tried to make it and I’m going to a) give it my best shot and b) hope mom remembered to write down the recipe correctly. If mine turns out the way I hope it will, you can feel confident following the step-by-step instructions from the woman whom God in heaven has no doubt conscripted as his personal pie maker.
And if I screw it up? ?
I’m going to call the Dorothy Lane Market in Dayton, Ohio, and see if they will FedEx me one of their chocolate cream pies, but I somehow doubt the whipped cream topping would survive the trip.
Step 1: Prepare the crust
(Note: I took photos of each step in case you’re one of those visual persons who, in our digital age, is no longer capable of reading text unless it is accompanied by a picture.)
Mom didn’t bother writing down her recipe for piecrust because she knew I couldn’t have come even close to making one like hers. She advised that I should buy a frozen crust, which I did.
For years, mom used lard— rendered pig fat— to make her crusts. Once my father started carrying Crisco in his grocery store, she began using that. She said a Crisco crust wasn’t as good as a lard crust but that nobody born after the Harding administration would know the difference.
I bought a frozen pie crust from my local Publix. According to the ingredients on the wrapper, Publix uses palm oil and soybean oil rather than lard or Crisco.
Publix’ instructions say to remove the foil pie pan containing the crust from the plastic wrapper (duh) and allow it to thaw for 15 minutes, after which you should “thoroughly prick crust” (unless you’re a thorough prick in which case you probably refuse to follow instructions anyway). After pricking, “place on baking sheet and bake on middle rack for 12 to 15 minutes until piecrust is golden brown, and cool completely before pouring desired filling into crust.” Why would anybody pour their undesired filling into the crust?
At the risk of sounding like former Congressman Anthony Weiner, here is a close-up of my pricks. I didn’t know how thoroughly I should “thoroughly prick crust” so I used a fork to prick it all over as shown. A question for you pie cooks reading this: Are these pricks "thorough" enough? Please advise.
Here’s the Publix frozen crust just out of the oven. Damn! The crust fell while it was baking and no longer comes up to the top of the foil pie pan which means that, once I prepare my “desired filling,” I won’t be able to pour it up to the top of the pan because it will ooze back behind the crust. I guess I will have to eat any unused filling out of the pan it cooked in because mom always told me I shouldn’t waste food.
Make the filling
Measure and pour the following into a large bowl:
1/2 tsp salt...
3/4 cup of sugar...
1/3 cup of flour …
... to which you add cornstarch, filling the measuring cup up to 1/2 cup. In other words, add enough cornstarch to make a total of 1/2 cup of combined flour and cornstarch. (There will be a pop quiz after you have completed reading this post so make sure you understand this perfectly before proceeding.)
Add 3 heaping tablespoons of cocoa.
Mix all the dry ingredients thoroughly with a fork and place in a large saucepan.
Add 2 cups evaporated milk …and 1/2 cup water. But don’t turn on the stove yet. (Note: There are more than 2 cups of milk in these cans. Throw away the unused milk unless you are one of those people who actually put canned milk in your coffee like mom and her friends used to do. )
Separate two eggs. No dummy, I don’t mean put them side by side,
as if you’re separating two fighting children.
Crack each open carefully, hold over a cup and gently toss the yolk back and forth in the two halves of the shell as the white part of the egg falls into the cup. Once all the white has fallen into the cup, drop the yolk into a bowl. Throw away the shell unless you’re one of those people who “thinks organically” and keeps a compost pile by the side of your house in which case you can throw the shell onto that, which will attract rats, raccoons, ants and other pests you don’t want while emitting an odor that will make your neighbors think you have an outhouse instead of an inside bathroom.
If you see a red speck in one of the egg yolks that looks like this, congratulations — a chick is (make that was) on the way. You murdered it when you cracked the shell. It will never breathe life, never bring pleasure to little children at Easter. Throw that egg away and crack open another and repeat the “back and forth” separation process.
Beat the two yolks with a hand mixer and set aside.
Place the cup with the egg whites in the fridge — you will need them later.
Cook chocolate mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. I don’t understand why you can’t use any old spoon but I did what mom said and looked high and low for a wooden spoon, which I finally found in a little-used drawer.
Uhh, this wasn’t looking right. As I was cooking, I was seeing clumps of cocoa and/or flour and/or corn starch in the liquid mixture, so I got out our trusty vintage GE hand mixer and beat the clumps away. Presto, within a minute or two it was smooth as silk.
When the chocolate mixture is thick (mom didn’t define "thick" but I think she meant about as thick as ketchup), take two tablespoons of it and add to the bowl containing the beaten egg yolks. This is called tempering. If you would have added the yolks directly to the pan containing the hot chocolate, you would have had scrambled eggs. Beat two tablespoons of chocolate mixture into the yolks.
Add the contents of the yolk and chocolate bowl gradually into the saucepan with the rest of the chocolate mixture.
Stir until mixture reaches the boiling point. (Spoiler alert: This is where I think I went wrong. I stirred that mixture until it was as thick as concrete but it never did boil. The good news: I don’t have to lift weights for a month. I got a great upper body workout stirring and stirring and stirring, waiting for the mixture to boil. Finally, I couldn’t stir it any more because it was so thick, so I took it off the stove.)
Add 1 tablespoon vanilla extract to mixture. (I forgot to take a picture of this step but if you can't envision it you have no business being near a stove, much less in a kitchen.)
Pour mixture into cooled, thoroughly pricked pie shell.
Make meringue
Pour reserved egg whites into a bowl and beat with mixer, gradually adding three or four tablespoons of sugar.
Beat until meringue holds up in peaks.
Spread on pie and brown in medium oven (mom didn’t define “medium” so I set it on 350 degrees) until meringue is flecked with brown.
The result?
The pie, to my amazement, looked perfect — every bit as authentic as mom’s (sans the homemade crust). And it was all for me. My wife doesn't like chocolate pie any more than I like peach pie.
Alas, it was inedible. The filling was way, way too thick -- "gummy" is the word that comes to mind -- and generally flavorless. It wasn’t burnt but I perceived the presence of flour and/or cornstarch. I couldn’t finish my first piece. The meringue, however, was excellent.
An earnest plea
Has anyone reading this ever made a successful (e.g. not only edible but delicious) chocolate pie using the same basic recipe as mom’s?
Some recipes I’ve found call for chocolate bars or chocolate chips but mom always used cocoa — Hershey’s to be specific, nothing fancy like Ghirardelli. Her plain-old Hershey cocoa chocolate pies were incredible, so I’m looking for help from someone who has made cocoa-based chocolate pies.
Otherwise, I’ll be calling that gourmet market in Dayton, Ohio, first thing tomorrow to see if they can ship me one of their cream-topped pies and if they can’t, I’ll be moving there permanently.
Life is short and then you die. And until I do, I don’t want to live in a world without chocolate pie like mom used to make.
