A quest for a chocolate pie we all deserve
It shouldn’t be hard to find a decent chocolate cream pie. It’s chocolate pudding, set in pie crust, topped with whipped cream. That’s it. You could use pudding from a box, a storebought graham cracker crust and cover the whole thing with Reddiwip from a can, and it would be a dadgum good pie.
And yet, for the first eight years of my marriage, the ultimate chocolate cream pie was my husband’s personal white whale; this is the story about how I drove a harpoon straight through that whale’s creamy, chocolaty heart.
When I met Matt on a beersoaked sidewalk in 2005, we were both working as pastry chefs, so we implicitly knew that a potential relationship could, if we desired, contain a substantial amount of chocolate cream pie.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Matt was actively engaged in a yearslong feud that was not based on pudding but principle. On an early date, he told me the tale of a night when he was stricken with a craving for chocolate cream pie. He walked to a nearby bakery and bought an entire pie for the suspiciously low price of $4.95. He went back home, cut himself a slice, and the pie was horrible. “Horrible!” he shouted to me wide-eyed in the middle of a romantic restaurant, slamming his hand on the table with the ferocious passion of a man who took pie extremely seriously. I had never been more turned on in my life.
He recounted its shortcomings: The insipid crust was neither tender nor flaky. The chocolate pudding’s primary note was of spare change with an undercurrent of vanilla body spray, telltale signs that the pudding had been produced in a factory. On top, a chalky halo of “whipped cream,” which he said using air quotes.
The pie represented the costcutting chicanery he expected from a big-box store, not a neighborhood bakery. A few months later, when the craving struck again, he went to another bakery ... and was served the same pie. Crust from a mix. Pudding from a can. “Whipped cream.”
He became obsessed with finding respectable chocolate cream pie in our little corner of the city, which, at the time, was not yet sophisticated enough to have a Starbucks. As he rambled on about all the subsequent pies that had disappointed him, I realized that he was not searching merely for a pie that tasted good but a pie that respected him.
That’s what all of us want from pie, isn’t it? We want a pie that sees us as someone worthy of excellence.
Eight years later, Matt and I opened a bakery, and I realized we had inadvertently created a loophole that allowed me to at last make the chocolate cream pie of his dreams.
I spent several days fussing with every element to get it just right and used the finest ingredients I could find. It was a pie specifically designed to meet ridiculously high standards; the pie I knew I’d make for him the night he first told me of his quest. He told me it was perfect; I told him, “I told you so.”
There has never been a sweeter pie.
Two years later, Matt developed a serious dairy allergy and never had the pie again; we closed the bakery. Today it arises, just as humanity needs it most.