All-American Chocolate Pies & Cakes

By Meryle Evans

"I think this is the most delicious pie I have 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 I should refuse outright to die, for life would be too good to relinquish." That was how novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings described Black Bottom Pie in Cross Creek Cookery, a book of her favorite recipes published in 1942. Well, this scrumptious chocolate and rum custard concoction has always been a favorite of mine too, and it is one of a trio of American chocolaty desserts that are ideal for a voluptuous Valentine indulgence.

Like so many other culinary classics, the origin of Black Bottom is an unsolved mystery. Rawlings, a Floridian, wrote that her recipe came from an old hotel in Louisiana. Duncan Hines, the peripatetic restaurant sleuth of the 1930's, raved about the Black Bottom pie he relished over the years at the Dolores Drive-In in Oklahoma City. And a very immodest baker named Monroe Boston Strause, the self-proclaimed creator of the chiffon pie, devoted a whole chapter of his 1939 book Pie Marches On To Black Bottom: "This is without doubt the most sensational pie that has ever been introduced and is one of the outstanding originals of the writer. Aside from being a sensation, I believe it brought the highest price that any pie ever sold at commercially; $1.90 for a nine-inch pie, retail." It has been hard to substantiate Strause's claim, and John Edgerton in his charming description of foodways in Southern Sideboards concludes that "we may never know the true source of Black Bottom Pie." Recipes for the pie are as varied as theories about its origin. Some are made with crumb crusts—graham cracker or gingersnap—others with a pie shell. My family has always been partial to the Duncan Hines version with a gingersnap crust and a layer of dark chocolate custard topped with a rum-chiffon filling, whipped cream, and chocolate shavings.

While Black Bottom remains a stand-by at old-fashioned diners that evoke the era of the Dolores Drive-In, Mississippi Mud, another rich, down-home dessert, certainly of Southern ancestry, has become a favorite with contemporary pastry chefs across the country. It is of relatively recent origin, probably from the 1970's. Some of the recipes are for cake, others for pie, still others for a combination of the two. But they all share one characteristic: a crusty, crackly top that resembles the mud on the banks of the mighty river.

Some culinary historians claim the Vicksburg-Natchez area as the birthplace of the mud cake/pie; others point to Georgia where, in the 1970's, it was one of the most popular recipes ever printed in the food section of the Savannah paper. That recipe, reprinted in a community cookbook, Savannah Sampler, is for a chocolate cake with chopped pecans. As soon as it is removed from the oven, the top is covered with miniature marshmallows, left to cool, and then topped with chocolate "mud" icing.

Noted culinary authority Jean Anderson, a North Carolinian with whom I've enjoyed food history sleuthing for many years, writes about a similar cake version in her excellent The American Century Cookbook (1997): "This has to be the richest cake in all creation, a chocoholic's idea of bliss." Her first encounter with that bliss was in the 1970's in Jackson, Mississippi, but she also recalls her initial taste of a pie version in the mid-70's at the Mills House Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. To her surprise, the pie was not created by the chef, but came from Nabisco, "a glorious sin," made with an Oreo cookie crust, coffee ice cream, hot fudge sauce, and whipped cream.

Inventive chefs have added as many variations as there are twists and turns in the river. Emeril Lagasse added bourbon to a coffee filling. The admirable Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, where previously unemployable people are expertly trained, sells a "Lotus in Mud" cake with a dense chocolate base filled with ganache and pieces of chocolate cake, blanketed with a thick chocolate glaze, and decorated with a Lotus blossom. Up in Montreal, at Restaurant Savannah, New York born chef/owner Peter Pryor is indoctrinating Canadians in

Cub Room Mississippi Mud Cake

the nuances of Southern cooking. His post-modern mud pie resembles an ice cream sandwich — double espresso ice cream between two baked layers of a crust made with graham crackers, pecans and chocolate. The sandwiches are frozen, cut in triangles, and plated with chocolate and caramel sauce. At the Cub Room in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, executive chef Ben Grossmman and pastry chef Peter Steele collaborated on recipe testing for their stellar thick and gooey Mississippi Mud Cake, laced with bourbon and Grand Marnier. They combine cocoa and both unsweetened and semi-sweet chocolate in the batter and bake it in a water bath. House-made marshmallows cover the top.

While mud cake and black bottom pie are 20th-century creations, the incomparable Devil's Food Cake with thick, fluffy, boiled white icing or cream cheese frosting, made its debut toward the close of the 19th-century. It was the era of "cake mania" according to one Midwestern hostess, when home makers vied to present the most impressive array of rich, handsome, and delectable cakes for afternoon get-togethers. Although chocolate had been slowly creeping into the dessert repertoire since the end of the Civil War, it was not until the Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, where numerous European chocolate manufacturers displayed their products, that it caught on as the blue-ribbon ingredient for baking.

Brownstone Front Cake, probably named for its light brown color that resembled the sandstone facades of New York houses, appeared in an 1895 cookbook, and Devil's Food arrived a few years later. It was surely thought to be as sinful as the devil but also had a devilish red/brown hue caused by the chemical reaction of baking soda and the type of cocoa used at that time. Reminiscent of those early versions, Red Velvet Cake is still made today with soda and cocoa rather than solid chocolate. Recently for the 10th anniversary of Red Sage restaurant in

Bill Yosses' Devil Dogs

Washington, D.C., pastry chef Josh Short made a four-layered textured cake flavored with Chambord and a hint of chocolate for an all-red menu. The cream cheese frosting on Short's cake is topped with a caramelized Italian meringue and a white chocolate candle. Patrick Coston, consulting pastry chef at New York's North Square restaurant, updates his Devil's Food by creating a parfait-style dessert in a glass with layers of vanilla panna cotta and chocolate pudding in between rounds of the rich cake, while other Manhattan pastry chefs like Karen DeMasco of Craft and Nicole Kaplan at 11 Madison Park have downsized, making petite cream-filled chocolate cupcakes that are playful takes on their Hostess and Drake's snack food counterparts. Bill Yosses, pastry chef at Citarella the Restaurant in New York City, takes the game a step further with a sensational re-creation of Drake's Devil Dogs. The original "dogs" were sold by Drake Brothers Bakery in Brooklyn starting in 1923. They remain one of the company's best sellers, but.on Valentine's Day, go for the Yosses version.

MISSISSIPPI MUD CAKE

• see recipe

DEVIL DOG

• see recipe
     

Meryle Evans is a food journalist and culinary historian who has written extensively about the world's cuisines for over twenty years. She was an editor of the American Heritage Cookbook, the Horizon Cookbook, and the eighteen volume Southern Heritage Cookbook Library. As a Contributing Editor at Food Arts, Meryle has covered cooking and culture from Australia to Chile, Turkey to Tunisia for the past fourteen years. She also lectures on various aspects of culinary history and was the curator of "The Confectioners Art," an exhibit at the American Craft Museum. Other food related activities include judging the James Beard and IACP cookbook awards and the Tabasco Community Cookbook Competition.