The Darkness of Chocolate Pie

(by Lenore Hart)

Author's reading

My parents married each other for the first time in 1952. He was 27. She was 18, just out of high school. Mom learned to cook, although we also ate canned and frozen offerings. In 1960s and ‘70s Central Florida, frozen canned potato soup was a frequent go-to, but every Monday night we had a special dinner of steak and salad with homemade bleu cheese dressing.

One night, when I was in elementary school, Mom was ill in bed, and Dad was at the stove.

“What’re you making?” I asked.

“She doesn’t know how to season a steak,” he muttered, as he soaked three rib-eyes in Worcestershire, then sprinkled them with Beau Monde, celery seed, and black pepper.

Mom, who had migraines and stomach issues, would often lie in a darkened bedroom as we tiptoed around. On those nights my father concocted some eccentric dishes. Once, he dug swordfish filets from the freezer and dunked them in milk and egg. Discovering nothing else for breading them, he lifted my little sister and me onto the kitchen counter, then poured a box of Raisin Bran (back then, fortunately, unsweetened) into a big bowl. “Pick out all the raisins,” he said, then breaded the filets with the crushed bran flakes. As they sizzled in the pan, my mother called in a tragic voice, from down the hallway, “My God, what are you cooking?” Still, I recall that crispy outside/flaky inside fish as delicious. 

Dad owned a radio and television shop, selling the new, repairing the old. He was well known in town, and had a habit of turning everything one said into a joke or pun. Much later I learned he was extremely popular with female customers for his extra-personal service calls. He frequently was gone from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on those days my mother seemed angry. When not at school, we were supposed to play outside, running around the rural neighborhood with other kids, or swimming in the shallow, alligator- and snake-infested lake out back.

A couple years later, Mom hit on a new plan to entice my father home earlier. She scoured fancy cookbooks and essayed French sauces, coq au vin, and complex desserts. She heated the plates for these elaborate offerings, and to avoid scorching the antique table, she set them atop embossed ceramic plaques, where they teetered precariously as we used our knives and forks. 

Her scheme wasn’t without merit. My father loved to eat, except for chicken dishes, which he doused in A-1 Sauce. As the youngest of three sons in a rural home, he’d been the designated wringer of the birds’ necks. But he loved sweets the most. The way to bring him home, Mom finally seemed to decide, was with recipes involving chocolate, particularly pies and cakes. I later added my own contribution: chocolate chip cookies studded with M&Ms, pecans, walnuts, even candied fruit. I’m not sure how well her scheme actually worked, but he did come home earlier, some nights.

While reading a magazine, Mom found a chocolate pie recipe that called for Cool Whip, the ubiquitous frozen topping of the 1970s, to be mixed into melted, sweetened Baker’s chocolate to create a mild, cream-pie-like filling. She’d hesitated, frowning down at the recipe, and finally decided to keep those two ingredients separate. That brilliant move resulted in three layers instead of two: a sweet, crispy graham cracker crust, a rich, dense fudge layer, and Cool Whip topping. She called it Fudgie Chocolate Pie. Dad was smitten with it.

Still, by the time I turned ten, they had divorced. My mother, sister, and I went to live with our maternal grandmother in Orlando. Four years later, my parents reunited, and we returned to the split-level, lakeside rancher.

Once, when I was about 13, my aunt and uncle from Minnesota came down to visit, and Mom made spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad. When we sat down to eat, though, one condiment was missing. “Go get the Parmesan cheese,” my mother told me.

In the kitchen I opened the refrigerator, and reached for a glass bottle of Parmesan on the top shelf. But then I noticed there were at least six more bottles in there, all at various levels of depletion, as if we collected the grated cheese instead of eating it. This struck me as amusing, so I pulled each bottle out, cradled the lot in my arms, and went back to stand beside my mother’s chair. “Which one did you want?” I asked, eyebrows raised.

The whole table erupted in laughter. Except my mother, who reached out and slapped me hard across the face. “Kay!” her sister, my Aunt Charlotte, gasped. Mom ignored her and snapped, “Now go sit down!” And so I did, pushing the spaghetti around on my plate, no longer hungry, cheek hot and throbbing as if from a wasp sting. No one said anything else; they were all suddenly fascinated by their plates. While I thought, not for the first time, that my mother disliked, or maybe even hated me.   

Yet she, too, could be funny. Which was why it hadn’t occurred to me that my Parmesan cheese joke would enrage her. We sometimes made up silly songs on drives to town, or acted out scenes from TV shows. We played word games in the car, too, but rarely vacationed. Did I mention my father was a workaholic with sex-addict tendencies? This must’ve been at least one source of Mom’s chronic anger, headaches, and stomach issues. Though I had no idea there was such a thing as relationship power dynamics, back then. Later on, I realized my mother had been in a lifelong sibling perfectionist competition with my aunt, who’d married an airline pilot and lived in a big, gleaming house on 40 acres just outside Minneapolis. And so with my childish joke I had committed the worst sin, perhaps, in Mom’s mind, demonstrating that her housekeeping methods were not, in fact, absolutely perfect.  

I had my first serious boyfriend my senior year of high school, a classmate I’d dated before in tenth grade, who’d moved to Texas and then came back a year later. And this launched my own introduction to cooking solo, though without really thinking of the parallels between my mother’s relationship behavior and my own. The first summer after graduation Mike began working for my father in his store, and I decided to cook lunch for both of them. Previously my job in the kitchen had been as retriever of ingredients or stirrer of sauces. Now I drew on my observation of my mother making her go-to dishes, including spaghetti and meat sauce, meatloaf and potatoes, and beef Stroganoff. Unfortunately I hadn’t thought about portions or the heaviness of ingredients. After a few weeks of coming home with my father every day to eat, and then go back to work, my boyfriend drew me aside. “You’re a really good cook, but… well… it’s so much food! All afternoon I can barely breathe. It’s like my stomach’s about to explode. Maybe we could just have some sandwiches?”      

I left home at 18, after a bigger than usual argument with my mother, determined to never be like her. After living briefly with my grandmother, I got my own apartment, and began work on the first of several college degrees. I had many boyfriends, some of whom I cheated on, as that seemed to me a normal thing that happened in relationships. Some of them returned the favor. Infidelity appeared also be the normal way one ended a relationship, as seen at home.

I kept cooking, too, and briefly even dated a chef. Being free to do things my way made me feel more in control. I created my own recipes after following cookbook directions once, then changed the dish to suit my taste. But never to entice a man home earlier.

One night I made Mom’s Fudgie Chocolate Pie for a live-in boyfriend, a tall, long-haired musician from East Texas. I left out the Cool Whip, having always disliked its plastic-y consistency and taste. I substituted hand-whipped heavy cream, and it turned out to be perfection.

My parents divorced for the second time when I was in my mid-20s, only to reconcile again a few years later. I learned only after my father’s death that Mom had affairs as well, and that they had never actually remarried after the second split. Mom (always the one who had to leave, somehow) had simply moved back into the family home as if nothing had changed. In many ways, I suppose it hadn’t. The split-level rancher had only his name on the deed. 

By then I felt somewhat shut out of the family, as if I was being punished for leaving home to attend university and then marrying a poet who became a lawyer. Eight years later, after I’d divorced, remarried (to a novelist who stayed a novelist) and moved to Virginia, my mother wailed over the phone to my sister, “We’ve lost Lenore!” As if I’d died or been kidnapped by a cult. Even though I returned home for holidays and often in between, I was an outsider. Things happened in the family, important things, and sometimes no one told me.

I’d been unhappy in a different way than my mother, and living my young adult years acting more like my father. Neither parental persona was a good model for anyone’s life; neither was really me. That second time, I married a man nothing like those in previous relationships, and soon I was pregnant. Having a daughter was something I’d imagined for most of my adult life, though I’d almost given up on it happening.

(My mother Kay, my daughter Naia, and me)

I didn’t identify with my mother in most ways. Yet I’ve come to believe that her desperation, and long bouts of look-at-me cooking binges, are at least partly responsible for my gradual awakening. I came to understand that one can take a pre-existing thing—a house, a garden, a manuscript, a recipe, a family, a life—and make it better, or at least more one’s own. That realization also gradually made clear that I didn’t have to live a life shaped by one parent’s anger and depression, or the other’s absences and control. I could create wholly different family traditions and relationships. The past needn’t be repeated, at least not forever.

So I encouraged my daughter to make whatever was desired, even if it left a god-awful mess. Naia (who’s nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, but still likes the word “daughter”) cooked with me from a very young age. And gradually, on their own, made “magical potions” that bubbled away on the stove. Once they even concocted perfume from scratch, which, sadly, smelled terrible. But it was still the experience and freedom to pursue a dream that counted. That felt right to me, like almost rectifying a childhood where the messes must be kept secret, out of sight. I wanted to ensure that wouldn’t be the kind of memories my daughter took away from our family and our lives.

When I asked Naia, an artist, how our cooking adventures had influenced them, the answer made me smile: “Being encouraged to do all of that showed me it was okay to experiment. To risk creating and then changing things.” So today I sent them my mother’s old pie recipe, my final revision clearly noted. Then again, who knows? Maybe that won’t be the final tweak made to this three-generation family recipe.  

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Lenore Hart is the author of eight novels and the series editor of The Night Bazaar fiction anthologies. A Historical Novel Society (Britain) gold medal winner and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, she lives in Virginia and teaches at the Ossabaw Island Writers Retreat. She also serves on the boards of the Irish Writers Union and the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency, and is fiction editor at Northampton House Press. She can be found at www.lenorehartbooks.com, on Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, and Bluesky. 

Original Fudgie Chocolate Pie

Crust:

1 1/2 c. graham cracker crumbs

1/3 c. white sugar

6 T. butter, melted

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Combine cracker crumbs, melted butter, and sugar in a mixing bowl; mix until well blended.

Press the mixture into the bottom and up the sides of a round 9-in. pie pan.

Bake for 7 minutes. Allow to cool completely before adding the filling.

Filling:

4 oz. semisweet baking chocolate

1/2 c. margarine

14 oz. sweetened condensed milk

2 eggs, slightly beaten

1/2 c. whole milk

1 t. vanilla extract

1/8 t. salt

Lower oven to 350 F.

In heavy saucepan over low heat, melt chocolate and margarine. Remove from heat.

In a large mixing bowl, combine sweetened condensed milk and warm chocolate mixture, mixing well.

Quickly stir in eggs, milk, vanilla, and salt.

Bake 35 - 40 minutes.

Cool, chill, top with Cool Whip, and serve.  

Revised Fudgie Chocolate Pie, which I kept changing over the years

Topping:

Substitute real cream for the Cool Whip:

Pour 1 pt. heavy whipping cream into a mixing bowl; add sugar to taste (I tend to use very little, maybe 1 T.)

Beat on low speed at first, slowly raising the speed to high, and whip until it develops firm peaks. Then spoon atop cooled, chilled chocolate pie.

Filling: I prefer the slightly less-sweet taste of the pie when made with bittersweet chocolate. And I use Irish butter, not margarine.

Crust:

I add 1/2 t. cinnamon to the graham cracker crust, and substitute turbinado sugar for white sugar.

Once we discovered my daughter and I were both gluten-intolerant, back in the mid-2000s, I started buying finely-ground gluten-free graham cracker crumbs, or I ground up gluten-free graham crackers myself. This recipe is also good with a gluten-free nut crust, substituting about 1/2 c. finely ground pecans for the same amount of cracker crumbs. Be sure to still prebake the crust; it will hold together better.

More variations:

Coconut and chopped pecans can be used to top the pie filling just before baking, then bake the usual time or a little bit more, until the shredded coconut is golden brown. Then you can omit the whipped cream if you like, or just go for everything at once.