For Valentine’s Day, all I wanted to give you was some chocolate pudding. My reasoning was straightforward: while rich desserts and opulent meals are lovely, they are not intrinsically romantic in my opinion. After an evening like this, I usually feel quite exhausted, too full for even a nightcap, and, let’s be honest, like I need to spend an hour on the treadmill. I detest the treadmill as well.
However, none of them are relevant to chocolate pudding. Before I discovered the recipe that would work best, I went through dozens and dozens of recipes. It would be chocolaty but not overly heavy, rich but not too rich. To put it simply, it’s the kind of meal you want to spend the majority of your life with the person you love without having to worry about cutting it short. It also looks like a manageable recipe that you could make on a weeknight.
This proved to be an unexpectedly difficult task. Chocolate pudding, you see, has lost its identity. As chocolate desserts have become increasingly rich over time, so-called “puddings” have also increased in decadence. All of a sudden, the chocolate pudding your mother or grandmother prepared for you has been mashed up with egg yolks, cream, and butter. They are prepared in food processors, whipped with egg whites, tipped in immersion blenders, and baked in ramekins in water baths with tented foil coverings. Though these desserts—pot de crèmes, pasty creams, souffles—sound like many wonderful things, they aren’t.
This is the point in the story where I have to tell you how my mother feels about making chocolate pudding—that is, that she believes it is useless. She shares my love of cooking, so one day when my sister and I were little, she set out to make a homemade version of the My-T-Fine we were all familiar with. She claimed that it tasted exactly like the stuff in the box and took an eternity. She was never going to make it back. When I go on about planning to make my own yogurt, marshmallows, or sourdough starter, she says, “Some things are just not worth it.”
It broke my heart that I detested the recipe, but of course I didn’t listen and jumped headfirst into a recipe from someone I adore so much. You began with a double boiler, then moved on to a saucepan, then a food processor, followed by another saucepan, a food processor, and finally a food processor. No, this is not a hoax. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I put butter, cocoa powder, bittersweet chocolate, egg yolks, and a whole egg in it. It wasn’t particularly amazing, but it was good enough to tell my mother—oh, and we did eat it without any complaints—if not downright embarrassing. She saved me the “I told you so,” which is to her credit.
However, I knew I had to save you this recipe, which is really more of a pudding than a pastry cream. You could have, quite rightly, laughed at that. It’s pudding, not salted butter caramel ice cream, for crying out loud. This proves that not all of the recipes I’ve had for a long time have been worth keeping.