I don’t advocate
sugar for people, since it has been shown to contribute to undesirable diseases,
but for those who want some sweet dessert, here is an old fashioned sugar
delivery product that I changed from pie to crustless dessert. I found it as
pie filling in two of my very old and much loved cookbooks from Better Homes
and Gardens, issued in 1946 as deluxe edition, and in 1953 with “New” added to
the title. The title has been “new” with subsequent editions for more than another
half century.
They called it Chocolate Chiffon Pie. Over time the
recipe disappeared from recent editions of the cookbook. I don’t find it in the
12th or 15th edition, which are in my collection. Other
chiffon pies also absented themselves from the newer books. I raised my
children on pumpkin chiffon pie for holidays, and that is gone too. Alas for
today’s eaters. It is very good.
Chiffon pie ingredients are puffed up with egg white and
held together with unflavored gelatin. The
pie is easy to make and requires no baking except for the crust, although it
requires a few hours of refrigeration. While I make very good pie crust, I
thought it would be easy to skip the pastry and put the filling into a dish and
later serve it with a spatula or spoon and top it with whipped cream (or skip
the whipped cream). It requires no exotic ingredients unless one thinks
unflavored gelatin is exotic, and no strange or expensive equipment. We are not
Martha Stewart in this instance.
The two old cookbooks give the recipe the same except for
the number of eggs (three or four). I present it with some modification but
essentially as I found it. The dessert is very easy to make and tastes good.
Chocolate Chiffon
Dessert
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate in pieces
½ cup boiling water.
Melt
the chocolate in the boiling water.
1 envelope (1 tablespoon) unflavored gelatin
¼ cup cold water
Soften
the gelatin in the cold water and stir until the gelatin dissolves.
Add
the softened gelatin to the melted chocolate mixture.
3 egg yolks
½ cup sugar
Beat
the egg yolks light with the sugar. Add to the chocolate mixture.
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Add salt
and vanilla. Let it cool.
3 egg whites at room temperature
½ cup sugar
Beat
the egg whites until stiff and beat the remaining ½ cup sugar into them.
Fold
the egg whites into the chocolate mixture.
Pour
it all into a bowl. I used a rectangular glass baking dish.
Refrigerate
it until it is firm, about three hours.
Spread
it with optional whipped cream if desired.
To make this into pie, pour it into a baked pie crust and
chill as above.
Modified from:
Better Homes and
Gardens Cook Book, deluxe edition, Meredith Publishing Co., 1946, chapter
O, p. 7;
Better Homes and
Gardens New Cook Book, (title page missing due to overuse), 1953, p. 315.
