So I set out to find a perfect pudding recipe many years later, and I became enamored, as pastry chefs are wont to do, with French form. Pots de crème caught my eye, and later I flirted with the Italian budino, which, if I’m being honest, this recipe more closely identifies with.
‘Is it the pudding cup of our childhood? Not quite, no. But it started there.’
I grew up with a more American version, softer, typically a cornstarch, whole milk, easy-on-the-cream situation. That is a beautiful thing in its own right, a pudding for the ages. But there is a keen difference between those softer, American cornstarch-whole milk versions and the European yolk-cream ones, and acknowledging that feels like a respectful and important nod to the cooking-alchemy gods.
It’s true that, on occasion, I’ll pull out a cornstarch-based “traditional” (to Americans) pudding. These, to my mind, are best when they feel lighter, silky and soft — kind of like the ones, long ago, that filled a shiny-lidded container jostled around in your lunchbox. But I couldn’t let go of the fascination I felt with a richer, smoother affair, one that almost makes you feel the chocolate melting in your mouth, though it melted long ago in a hot custard. As I became more worldly about pudding, those after-school memories gave way to new ones, more grown-up ones, a discovery of how hot crème anglaise poured over bittersweet chocolate would taste and feel so remarkably different from what I knew in my childhood — and so extraordinary.
For this rich chocolate pudding, it only made sense to give it all the fat, all the eggs, all the cream, encouraging them all to play together with the bittersweet chocolate. The resulting delicate density wasn’t anything I had experienced before, each bite its own education in the importance of not just flavor but texture, every spoonful encouraging you to go as slowly as you can, letting it sit on your tongue just long enough to not be perverse.