A Family Secret

     In light of Christmas coming up in just a few days, I thought it might be nice to share a little bit of cheer on my resurrected blog: My grandmother's chocolate cream pie filling. I don't believe in secret recipes. Since my grandmother, bless her, is now beyond doing such things, every year this is my limited contribution to our Christmas merrymaking. I'm hardly a master chef (or any sort of chef, honestly. My ideal husband would be some sort of hybrid master chef-masseuse), and I think that's why this pie recipe works so well for me. It's really more like alchemy: mostly superstition and stirring. It's quite old, from a time before cocoa powder or instant pudding (Note: cream pies should never be made from pudding packs. This is heresy).

The original Betty Barrow with me, c. 2012

     You see, in the part of the South that I'm from, people were once (and some still are) very suspicious of fruit. There weren't very many fruits around, either. So instead of things like apple pie or strawberry-rhubarb pie, we made cream pies! Cream pies are strange, miraculous beasts. The most popular are coconut, lemon, and, of course, chocolate. The chocolate pie I make is something like a mousse, served in a crust. Making it is always an adventure for me, as I'm never quite sure what I'll get at the end. Traditionally, such a pie would be topped with meringue (a topping of whipped egg whites), but I'm a heathen and don't believe in meringue, so whipped cream it is. 

      Here are the things needed, and I suggest you have them all out before you get going (I never do this and end up hurling myself around the kitchen trying to get it together while the pot boils at me.)

You will need:  

1 pie crust (They're always better if you take the time to make them)

1 double boiler

1 c. sugar

1/3 c. flour 

A pinch of salt 

2 c. scalded milk

2 unsweetened chocolate squares

2 Tb butter

1 tsp vanilla 

And here are my annotated instructions: 

1. Mix sugar, flour and salt in double boiler while you're scalding your milk somewhere else. 

2. Gradually add scalded milk. I generally have the problem of dumping it all in at once and then remembering it said "gradual." It really is helpful to stir it in a bit at a time while it's hot, so your flour disappears.  

3. Add chocolate squares--sometimes I chop them up a bit before they go in, sometimes I don't. After the chocolate squares are in, you need to let them mostly incorporate, but it'll still look like milk with chocolatey bits floating in it. 

4. Add milk mixture to three beaten egg yolks. This is a truly strange step. What this means is you've got your eggs in a bowl and you spoon most of what you've been cooking into it. If you put the eggs in without doing this, it ends up being cooked egg bits in a chocolate broth. Gross. 

5. Add in butter and vanilla

6. Stir for approximately one year while becoming increasingly hopeless that it will ever be anything but speckly chocolate milk

7. Hope for the best. 

8. Magic (with luck) happens. 

9. Pour in crust and chill. 

You may notice that there are no listen times in this recipe? Well, that's part of the spontaneity of the thing. Honestly, anything could happen here. Last time, my pie came out with little gloops in it. I'm calling it Chocolate Pie with Doodads. Sounds festive, right? Merry Christmas from the Barrows! 

UPDATE 2017: This year my spontaneity manifested in forgetting to bake the pie crust in advance. The filling hung out in the double boiler. It was more patient than I expected.