A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [194]
Yvette Lance, a contest organizer, says the object is to see who can down the most MoonPies in five minutes. No drink allowed, not even an RC. The records: twelve for the big double-deckers and twenty-one for the smaller MoonPies. The winner gets a fifty-dollar Wal-Mart gift certificate and a new title: “MoonPie King of the Year.”
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BLACK BOTTOM PIE
MAKES 6 TO 8 SERVINGS
No one knows for sure when or where this southern classic originated. On one of the many online food sites, I read that a recipe for Black Bottom Pie had appeared in Lafcadio Hearn’s Creole Cook Book (1885). Not true—nor does anything remotely similar. According to James Beard (American Cookery, 1972), the recipe began showing up in cookbooks early in the 1900s. In community cookbooks, perhaps. Yet long research for my American Century Cookbook (1997) turned up no mention of black bottom pie before 1940. That year both The Woman’s Home Companion Cook Book and The Good Housekeeping Cook Book printed recipes for it, although only the latter called it Black Bottom Pie. Woman’s Home Companion not only titled it Two-Tone Chocolate Rum Pie but also changed the crumb crust from gingerbread to chocolate.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Cross Creek Cookery, published two years later, is by most accounts the book that launched Black Bottom Pie. Combining two recipes, one obtained from an old hotel in Louisiana and another from a southern friend, Rawlings was positively lyrical about the version she’d created: “I think that this is the most delicious pie ever eaten…a pie so delicate, so luscious, that I hope to be propped up on my dying bed and fed a generous portion. Then I think that I should refuse outright to die…” For her crumb crust, Rawlings says to roll fourteen gingersnaps to fine crumbs; fourteen of today’s cookies would barely dust the bottom of a pie tin.
As for the pie’s name, some suggest that it derives from the Black Bottom Stomp, a New Orleans dance popular in the 1920s and ’30s—about the time the pie was gaining local fame. Others insist that it comes from the color of the bottom (chocolate) layer—as black as bayou mud. Despite its unknown origin, Black Bottom Pie has remained a southern favorite for nearly seventy years. Note: Because the egg whites used in the top (rum) layer are not cooked, it’s best to use pasteurized eggs for this recipe. Tip: The easiest way to make chocolate curls is to run a swivel-bladed vegetable peeler over a square of room-temperature semisweet chocolate. At first the curls may break, but as the heat of your hands softens the chocolate, you’ll be able to shave off lovely long curls.
Crumb Crust
1½ cups finely crushed gingersnaps (about thirty 2-inch round cookies)
4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter, at room temperature
Bottom (Chocolate) Layer
½ cup sugar
1½ tablespoons cornstarch
4 large pasteurized egg yolks, beaten well (see About Pasteurized Eggs, frontmatter)
2 cups steaming hot milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Two 1-ounce squares unsweetened chocolate, broken into small pieces (I whack the still-wrapped squares with a cutlet bat, then unwrap)
Top (Rum) Layer
1 envelope unflavored gelatin, softened in 3 tablespoons cold water
2 tablespoons rum, preferably dark rum (though not traditional, bourbon is also good)
4 large pasteurized egg whites
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
½ cup sugar
Topping
1 cup heavy cream, beaten to fairly stiff peaks
Semisweet chocolate curls (see Tip at left)
1. For the crust: Preheat the oven to 350° F. Mix the crumbs and butter well, then pat over the bottom and up the sides of an ungreased 9-inch pie pan. Tip: You’ll find this easier if you butter your hands lightly before handling the crumb mixture. Slide the crust onto the middle oven shelf and bake for 5 minutes (this is just to firm the crust up a bit; longer baking will make it too hard to cut easily). Remove the crust from the oven and cool.