chocolate

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Ingredients:

Many people come to our site each day (especially as we get closer to St. Patrick's Day) looking for traditional Irish dessert recipes, especially ones that contain Baileys Irish Cream.*

As far as "traditional" goes, this is always going to be a sticky subject... especially in Ireland, where the label is usually applied to recipes that have been around for hundreds of years. Can you have traditional recipes for anything that's only been around for thirty-five years? Locally, at least, the jury is still out (Though there's no problem with Baileys as such. Lots and lots of native Irish people love it.)

But there's no question that there's a tendency in North America to put Baileys in all kinds of desserts. The problem is that some of the desserts are distinctly dodgy. And this tendency manifests itself most fully in a whole lot of the recipes for "Baileys Mousse Pie" that are out there on the Web at the moment.

The worst thing about them -- the most un-Irish thing, anyway -- is probably their tendency to contain non-dairy toppings, either instant or frozen, as a major ingredient. One of our County Wicklow neighbors stopped EuroCuisineLady in the pub one evening a couple of months ago, knowing that she was an American, and asked her, "What exactly is Cool Whip?" ECL explained that it was a whipped topping that didn't contain any dairy products except the very processed milk chemical casein, and that its main attraction was probably that you could keep it in the freezer for a long time and just get it out when you needed it.

The neighbor then showed ECL a typical Baileys Mousse Pie recipe he'd found that contained nothing much but a graham cracker crust filled with Baileys, sugar, and Cool Whip. "What's this stuff doing in an Irish pie?" ECL's neighbor said: possibly with some reason, since Cool Whip does not exist in Ireland. In fact, no non-dairy topping has ever taken off successfully here, as native Irish people seem to think that there's no point in wasting your money on some weird overprocessed fake-cream product when there's perfectly good real cream all over the place. And the neighbor was very confused as to why -- if these recipes were being pushed as something Irish -- why the people inventing these recipes didn't make them the way Irish people would, with ingredients that you could normally find in Ireland. "They don't mind the cream in the Baileys," the neighbor said. "So why do they have to put this bogus chemical junk in?"

EuroCuisineLady had no quick answer to this. The conversation then wandered off into other territory, especially the question of non-bake versions of such a pie that might actually keep the Irish whiskey in the Baileys inside the pie instead of letting it be driven off by an oven's heat. ECL then went home and started to experiment, to the point where EuroCuisineGuy started wondering why the milkman was leaving so much cream every other day. (The EuroCats, however, did not complain at all.)

After some experiments, EuroCuisineLady finally constructed a Baileys Mousse Pie recipe that fulfills these requirements: (1) It contains no ingredients that are not available in Ireland. (2) The alcohol stays in it. (3) Native Irish people, after tasting it, have agreed that they don't mind it being called "Irish", and have declared it to be Not Bogus.

Please be clear: though the amounts of alcohol in the pie as a whole are not huge, you probably should not eat this pie and then drive. Other than that, all you need to know is that it's rich, it's yummy, and it freezes nicely if you have any extra left over. (Not very likely.)

Click on "read more" for the recipe and the method.

Paris is one of the great dessert cities of the world (which is one of the reasons why it makes so much sense for the excellent David Lebovitz to have settled there). At certain times of day (starting around five minutes after you thought your breakfast had settled...) it begins to seem as if there's a patisserie on every streetcorner, if not several of them in any given block... all their windows filled with stunning pastries and sweets.

The last time EuroCuisineLady was passing through the City of Light, she was on her way to a business gig, and had an overnight stay in a hotel in the Place des Vosges, Paris's oldest square. The Place is a beautiful place to just lounge or relax, but EuroCuisineLady's work schedule meant she was going to have to spend all of her "break day" and evening hammering on the laptop and sorting out various issues with people who were working on the same project.

Fortunately there was an unusually congenial place to do this. Café Hugo, just down the square from Victor Hugo's old home, offers WiFi access at reasonable rates: so ECL wandered in there, found a comfy table near the door where she could at least watch Paris go by if not actually participate in the scene, had a snack, and got on with business.

The weariness of the end of the work day, though, was broken by something unexpected. On a whim -- or rather, subliminally stimulated by the memory of the glossy gleam of chocolate in all those patisseries she'd seen on her one swift walk around the block early in the afternoon -- ECL asked for some chocolate ice cream for dessert. What she got went way beyond any possible expectation. Her memory is now vague on whether or not the ice cream came from one of the high-end glaciers like Berthillon. But it was terrific: a luscious, rich, creamy ice cream with the most amazing truffle-y mouthfeel, perfectly augmented by a shake of plain dark cocoa over the top.

Normally ECL is not the type to go insane trying to reproduce foods she eats on the Continent. She prefers either to remember them fondly from a distance, or to go back as soon as possible and eat them again. But when EuroCuisineGuy looked up at the electric ice cream maker a week or so ago and muttered, "How long has it been since we used that thing?", the memory of that ice cream drifted to the surface. And there was cocoa in the house, and eggs, and cream, and plenty of chocolate...

The recipe that follows is -- by one of those miraculous flukes that sometimes happens in the kitchen when you're improvising -- very, very close to what ECL had in Café Hugo that evening. The mouthfeel, at least, is right on, due at least partly to the use of both cocoa and chocolate in the mix. It is rich: all cream, no milk, three eggs (well, two egg yolks and a third whole one)... so if you're dieting at the moment, save this for later.

Finally, please note that you really need a mechanical ice cream maker for this.

Click on "read more" for the recipe and the method.   

(Welcome, Little People, Big World viewers! Many of you have visited us looking for a chocolate potato cake recipe: this is our favorite. Give it a try!)

In Maura Laverty's tremendous 1960's collection of traditional Irish recipes, Full and Plenty, this recipe comes with only one word of description: Rich.

Chocolate came to Ireland in the last decades of the 1600's and quickly became part of fashionable life in Dublin, then the United Kingdom's second city. Chocolate houses -- close cousins of the coffee houses that spread like wildfire through the cities of England, Scotland and Ireland in the 1600's -- started springing up in cities and towns all over Ireland in the early 1700's. The descendants of those chocolate houses are still with us in the form of establishments like the Butlers Chocolate Cafés now appearing in shopping centers and airports in Europe and elsewhere around the world.*

For a good while, chocolate was too expensive for most of the Irish population to afford. But as time went by and chocolate's European market increased, its price began to fall, putting chocolate more easily within reach of the country cook as well as the city consumer. Eventually the Irish came to consume even more chocolate per capita than the Swiss: the choco-consumption rate here remains one of the highest in the world.

Putting chocolate in cake is an obvious option: the earliest chocolate cake recipes start turning up in Irish cookbooks of the 1700's. It was probably only a matter of time before someone got the idea of adding potato to the mixture, since fresh mashed potato is famous for making breads and cakes tender, and for improving their keeping qualities, too.

Laverty's recipe, which dates back to the early 1800's and which we've adapted here, is unusual in specifically calling for grated chocolate rather than cocoa. This approach makes for a rich, dense chocolate cake with a wonderful baking-brownie aroma and a moist, substantial mouthfeel. While regular baker's chocolate works fine in this, if you're into designer chocolates and you want to exploit the flavor of one of them in a cake, you should really give this recipe a try.

Click on "read more" for the recipe and method.    

Sometimes it can be difficult to pin down the actual point of origin of a fad food or drink, like Irish coffee or the Singapore sling. So it's a pleasure, when someone asks "Where did chocolate fondue come from?", to be able to point to a spot and say with certainty, "Right there". In this case, the spot is a long-lost New York restaurant called Chalet Suisse.

This restaurant (routinely misspelled in many Web citations as "Chalet Swiss") was initially located, from the late 1940's until the mid-60's, at 45 West 52nd Street in Manhattan. Then in 1966 it moved to 6 East 48th Street, where it remained until the late 1980's: a long lifetime for any restaurant, and for one located in Manhattan, almost the equivalent of a geological age. Its owner -- originally, at the old address, its chef and then its chef-patron -- was a Swiss-born gentleman named Konrad Egli, or (to his friends and frequent guests) just Konni.

Chalet Suisse was the kind of place that inspired quiet but profound loyalty among the New Yorkers who knew about it. It's still remembered affectionately by such chef-luminaries as Jean Georges and seasoned food writers like William Grimes and Mimi Sheraton, who called it "altogether felicitous". From the start Chalet was known as a place that honored the culinary traditions suggested by its name: steady, reliable Swiss regional food, carefully handled, with nothing but the best ingredients involved in the process. James Beard wrote admiringly about the place while Konni was still just the head chef there.

For all the essentially conservative nature of the food at Chalet, Konni was not afraid to innovate. During the mid-'60s, as the move to the restaurant's new location just off Fifth Avenue drew closer, Konni apparently started thinking it might be a good idea to have some new things on the menu, and he started considering what those might be.

As it happens, very close to the new location -- one block north on Fifth, at the corner of 49th -- was the Swiss Center, which housed (along with the national airline Swissair and the Swiss bank UBS) the New York branch of the Swiss National Tourist Office. In his dealings with the Swiss Center, Konni was introduced to a PR lady named Beverly Allen who was associated with the SNTO. (The best-known source confirming this meeting and what came of it is probably Nika Standen Hazelton, author of The Swiss Cookbook. Nika gets the name of the restaurant a little backwards and in the wrong language, but at least she was writing during the right time period.)

Ms. Allen appears to have been working in conjunction with the SNTO and a Swiss-based chocolate company to publicize an interesting new product just then arriving in the USA from Switzerland -- a strange looking chocolate-and-nougat bar that could be broken into individual pieces, each shaped like a little stylized mountain. The stuff was called Toblerone, and Ms. Allen and the chocolate makers were looking for a way to launch it in the USA with a bang. Konni apparently thought about the new product for a while and decided that it could possibly be made into something new and interesting: a sweet fondue.

"The Swiss thought we were crazy," Ms. Allen says in the NY Times article cited above. But Konni, unconcerned by his people's opinions about his mental health, soon found a way to produce the desired result. Like so many Swiss things, it was incredibly simple, but also absolutely dependent on high-end basic materials -- in this case, nothing but heavy cream, Toblerone, and that favorite Swiss firewater, kirsch or kirschwasser.

The new dessert was launched in the restaurant's new 48th Street location not long after its opening. Nika Standen Hazleton fastens down the earliest launch date for us by specifically mentioning that the dessert "caught on like wildfire at the restaurant ... on 48th Street", so this means that chocolate fondue's genesis occurred no earlier than 1966 -- rather later than suggested by some online sources that push the invention back into the fifties. Possibly some of those sources are confused by Konni's presence at the restaurant's earlier 1950s incarnation. More confusion may be due to the fact that chocolate fondue was apparently not Konni's only innovation. Sylvia Lovegren, in Fashionable Food. Seven Decades of Food Fads, asserts that Konni was responsible not only for chocolate fondue, but also for the invention of fondue bourguignonne, in which fresh meat is dipped into a fondue pot full of hot oil, then (once cooked) eaten with savory sauces.*

Chalet Suisse is long gone now, its former space at 6 East 48th Street occupied initially by a pasta place, then a juice bar, now a pizza and breakfast-sandwich place called Toasties. It doesn't matter. Those of us who ate there can't walk past without seeing the ghost of that demure old facade with the red awning over the door, and remembering the characteristic "thump" that the inner door made when the outer door opened. Konni, too, is gone. He and his lovely wife Elisabeth moved to Florida, glad to leave the restaurant game behind them and relax into a happy retirement of bridge cruises. But Elisabeth died suddenly, and Konni -- never one to keep a lady waiting, especially not one he loved so dearly -- soon followed.

Nonetheless, the chocolate fondue he cooked up -- literally -- survives him all over the world. It's even made its way back to Switzerland... which probably amused him no end.

Click on "read more" for the recipe and method.

One of the great fad desserts of the 19th century, the Dobostorta, Dobos torta or torte (sometimes Anglicized as "Dobosh") was invented by the famous Hungarian confectioner Jozsef C. Dobos in 1884. Dobos owned a far-famed shop in Budapest that specialized in gourmet foods generally: at a time when shipping food over distance was usually unreliable, his shop routinely featured as many as sixty imported cheeses, as well as foreign wines, breads, and occasionally cakes. His high profile often took him to international food exhibitions, so that he became, for his time, what we would think of as the equivalent of a superstar TV chef / food impresario.

The fame of the torte to which Dobos gave his name was probably at least partly due to its extravagant use of chocolate buttercream / buttercreme, at a time when most cakes were iced or filled with cooked creams, whipped creams, or custards. Dobos had brought the buttercream recipe back with him from one of his many exploratory journeys -- in this case, a trip to France -- and shortly thereafter introduced the cake at the National General Exhibition of Budapest in 1885, as well as featuring it in his shop. Due to all this publicity (for it became a favorite of the Emperor and Empress of Austro-Hungary), people in cities across Europe began clamoring for it: but Dobos refused to license out the recipe. Instead. Dobos developed a special container in which it could be safely shipped, and "the cake with the secret recipe" soon started appearing in all the great European capitals. In fact, Dobos actually toured with the cake, personally introducing it in city after city, until the early 1900's, when he retired. He then gave the recipe to the Budapest Confectioners' and Gingerbread Makers' Chamber of Industry, on the condition that all members should be able to use the recipe freely.

Recipe and directions under the cut...