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Archive for the ‘Chocolate’ Category

Three martini lunch?

Here at Butter Flour Eggs, my mother is Executive Vice President of Food Nostalgia. Full disclosure: before she could be lured out of retirement to take the job, I was forced to sign a contract approximately the thickness of the Manhattan phonebook that contained a waiver forbidding me from referring to her age in any way. (So read on, and you do the math.)

Mom reminded me recently of a happy food memory she has carried with her for many years. Before my parents got married she worked for one of the high mucky mucks at the State House in Boston. On the days when she felt she could slip away without any risk that the wheels of state government would grind to a halt in her absence, she’d pop over to Schrafft’s for lunch.

Schrafft’s was before my time, but a couple of years ago I read a fun little book called When Everybody Ate at Schrafft’s by Joan Kanel Slomanson. More a reminiscence than a deep dive into the sociology behind the famous chain restaurant, I learned that in spite of Schrafft’s fame as a New York chain (they were almost as ubiquitous as Starbucks are now,) the company actually had deep New England roots. In fact, the Schrafft’s sign still hangs prominently on the Charlestown, Mass. landmark building that once served as the company’s candy factory.

My mom uses the same reverent tones when mentioning Schrafft’s Cottage Pudding that she uses when talking about some of the far-flung trips she and my Dad took.

I had no idea what Cottage Pudding was, and assumed it must have been something amazing. I grilled my mom: was it like bread pudding? No. Was it like those molten chocolate cakes that I just read have been declared old hat? No. Well, what was it then?

As she explained it, Cottage Pudding was a piece of plain white loaf cake served on a plate with warm chocolate sauce.

A piece of plain cake with chocolate sauce inspires a lifetime of reverent memories in a woman who is intelligent, cultured, and well travelled? Go figure, right? But that’s food: you never know what will grab you. And who knows what kind of emotions are tied up in the food we eat. With the weight of running the Commonwealth of Massachusetts practically resting on my Mom’s shoulders, maybe Cottage Pudding was some kind of soothing comfort food. Food is a primal urge. We can’t explain it.

Actually, a nice piece of cake with some warm chocolate sauce doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

But why is it called “pudding?”

I started with a little detective work. Cottage Pudding seems to have been around for a long time before my mother found it. There is a recipe for Cottage Pudding in the early Fannie Farmer cookbooks. A lot of people remember the name Fannie (or Fanny) Farmer from the chain of candy shops that disappeared a few years back, but actually she was a prominent New England cook and teacher, and wrote one of the first cookbooks that used standard measures (i.e., cups and teaspoons) in the recipes. The recipe for Cottage Pudding in the 1918 edition of her The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (now available on line here) is clearly for a cake.

The umbrella word that the British use for most desserts is “pudding.” If you take this somewhat wider definition of the word “pudding” into consideration, and keep in mind that Farmer was a product of the late 19^th century when there was still a British colonial influence on American food you’ll see that it isn’t much of a stretch for this dessert to be called “pudding.”

I hear you: you don’t want a history lesson, you want cake and you want it NOW! Fine: class dismissed. I’m off to the kitchen. The Schrafft’s chain is long gone but Cottage Pudding lives. I’m performing CPR on it.

I have two tasks at hand. The first is to create a modern version of a “homely” old dessert. The second is to try to provide my mom with a little reunion with a consoling old friend.

The Schrafft’s book I mentioned above was a good source for the Hot Fudge Sauce recipe. It is a basic cream, butter, sugar, chocolate sauce. True to its Schrafft’s roots, the sugary sauce is very “candy-shoppe” in its influence and easy to prepare. But the book doesn’t mention Cottage Pudding, so for the cake I first considered Fannie Farmer’s recipe. It is also very basic, and is likely very simple to make. But it also seems plain to the point of being austere. I think a better challenge would be to bring a little vitality to this party while still staying within the confines of Schrafft’s reputation for plain, home-style cooking.

So I went to my old fallback recipe: Ina Garten’s Lemon Yogurt Pound Cake, which I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago. With a few changes, and perhaps a bit of cosmetic surgery, this would give me a foundation on which to build, and a chance to bring Cottage Pudding into the 21^st century.

I started by scrubbing all of the lemon out of the recipe (Lemon and chocolate never seem to go well together.) But I thought the cake needed some kind of quiet counterpoint to the sticky ooze of the chocolate sauce. Vanilla seemed like the obvious choice, but not just the perfume of vanilla extract: I thought adding vanilla bean would give the cake its own vibrant personality to stand up to its overbearing saucy sister.

But how much vanilla bean? The normal rule in cooking is to start with less, because you can always add more of something but you can’t remove it. But this seemed like one time when breaking that rule was appropriate. I wanted to see what too much vanilla would taste like, so I added the contents of a whole vanilla bean.  This gave the dough an intense vanilla scent and a picturesque speckle of the little black dots from the bean.

In a nod to the current obsession with cupcakes I thought it would be fun to leave the loaf pan on its shelf for now, and try baking the dough in a muffin tin. That would accomplish portion control, yes, but also awaken the primal childhood instinct of having your very own cake (and yes, eating it too.)

My first hint that I was on the right track was the heady vanilla cloud that enveloped me and my kitchen when I opened the oven door to remove the cakes. Don’t be afraid to serve this dessert warm from the oven! The combination of warm sauce and warm cake throwing off its breathy vanilla-ness is intense. The combination of warm sauce and cool cake is equally gratifying—when the warm sauce hits the cool cake you get a slightly less aggressive vanilla hit, more like a poke on the shoulder reminding you, “I’m here too!”

By the way, Fannie Farmer recommended that the cake be served with Vanilla or Hard Sauce. Somehow it ended up at Schrafft’s served with their famous chocolate sauce. I wonder if that was Schrafft’s twist or my Mom’s? She’s been known to ask for a dollop of hot fudge sauce on everything but french fries.

Either way, my first thought on my first bite was, “Ohhhh! Ice Cream Shop!” Eat this and you are taken back in time to the cool air of a marble-lined neighborhood confectionary. I get it now, Mom. You just earned your cushy corner office.

By the way: if you’re into fondue, bake the cake in a loaf pan, cut it into cubes and serve with the hot sauce. I know fondue normally has some alcohol added: might I recommend the merest tipple of Cointreau?

And Mom? Please get back to work. That reminds me: I asked Mom what she had for lunch besides the Cottage Pudding. The famous Schrafft’s Chicken Sandwich? No. Their celebrated Lobster Newburgh? No.

Just the Cottage Pudding. That’s my Mom.

Click here for the Cottage Pudding recipe.

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Welcome to the USA!

A couple of years ago I noticed a disturbing trend: they tried to take my chocolate away from me.

No, there was no one riding up behind me on a Vespa trying to snatch the Hershey Bar with Almonds out of my hands as I walked along the sidewalk.

I’m talking about a subversive movement that seemed to be afoot to change us chocoholics into chocophiles. I think that sounds vaguely dirty, I resent it, and will not have any part of it.

They wanted us to have parties, and taste chocolate, like they do with wine! Can you imagine it? Melt a little square of chocolate in your mouth, trip the light fantastic with a few adjectives to describe it, spit it out, and then move on to the next. The whole affair just reeks of blue blazers and self control.

Thankfully, this trend has not taken hold. (Yet!) But the aftermath has not been pretty either: it seems that now there is a residual feeling that the only real chocolate is dark chocolate.

Oh, I so beg to differ.

I have a dirty little secret to reveal here: I think I have come to the conclusion that I prefer—dare I say it—milk chocolate.

Don’t misunderstand me: I love dark chocolate. I repeat: I love dark chocolate. 

The problem is that dark chocolate can be so intense. It requires a little bit of work, kind of like a friend who needs constant attention. But good milk chocolate is my friend who can sit with me in silence and neither of us feels conspicuous. We can sit and just “be.”

Before we proceed, you should know this about me: I am a sucker for a foreign wrapper. I once spent an entire afternoon in London roaming the aisles of the local Sainsbury’s (one of London’s grocery store chains.) Leave the famous Harrods’ food halls to the riff-raff; I had to see what Frosted Flakes looked like in London. Where others may bring back tchotchkes stamped, “London” on the side, I’ll bring back a bottle of dish detergent stamped, “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.”

Anyway, a few months ago I noticed a small pile of foreign-looking, block-shaped chocolate bars sitting by the checkout counter of Westside Market. The name, “Damak”, was indecipherable to me, which as you can guess only added to the allure, as did the fact that the only recognizable word amongst the Turkish on the wrapper was “Nestle.”

But ever since I got stung with a surprise $7.50 price tag for a chocolate bar at Whole Foods I have been reticent to experiment unless I know the price going in. The cashier told me they were only $2.49—a surprise nowadays when chocolate bars usually grab at least $3.50 from your pocket—but one that lowered my expectations. What the heck. I took a chance.

Is it great chocolate? How do you answer that question? Nowadays chocolate has become a numbers game, albeit a misleading one. Dark chocolate bars run anywhere from 50% to 70% or more cocoa. The fancy-schmancy Scharffen-Berger Milk Chocolate bar is 41% cocoa; the Damak, as far as I can gather, is 29% cocoa (the percentage is buried in the ingredients listing.)

But the numbers here lie, because the Damak bar also has 14% Antep pistachios. Buttery, slightly sweet Turkish pistachios. As you can see from the photo they aren’t ground up, but, true to the picture on the wrapper, left big and chunky. And this is where the magic starts.

It is smooth, lacking the graininess that seems to have afflicted Hershey Bars of late, and seemingly waiting to melt if you smile at it too broadly; to borrow an old advertising phrase, it melts in your mouth and in your hands. I pop a square or two on my tongue, let it melt a bit, then crunch down on the pistachios and let the whole jumble just kind of linger there for a while. I know this sounds like something that requires concentration, but trust me, I can multitask while melting, and that’s perhaps the advantage of the low melting point.

The chocolate has a friendly caramel tang that may remind some of Nutella, but without the suffocating, fatty, frosting heft.

I have no idea what country or genus of cocoa trees the pods came from. I can’t speak to the type of fermentation they use on the beans or the conching process or how the chocolate is tempered. I’m not even positive what “Damak” means. Google it yourself and take your pick.

Do you care about any of that stuff? Or once and for all do you just want me to answer the question, “Is it great chocolate?”

Yes, because I enjoy it. Period.