Black Bottom Pie (ATK)

• servings: 8 to 10

Ingredients

Crust

32 chocolate cookies (see note) broken into rough pieces (about 2½ cups)

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Pie

2/3 cup (4⅔ ounces/132 grams) sugar

4 teaspoons cornstarch

2 cups half-and-half

4 large egg yolks plus 1 egg white

6 ounces (170 grams) semisweet chocolate , chopped fine

3 tablespoons light rum or golden rum

2 tablespoons water

1 teaspoon unflavored gelatin

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

3 cups sweetened whipped cream

Directions

1. For the crust: Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grind cookies in food processor to fine crumbs. Add butter and pulse until combined. Press crumbs into bottom and sides of 9-inch pie plate and refrigerate until firm, about 20 minutes. Bake until set, about 10 minutes. Cool completely.

2. For the pie: Whisk 1/3 cup sugar, cornstarch, half-and-half, and egg yolks in saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to boil, about 8 minutes.

3. Divide hot custard evenly between two bowls. Whisk chocolate into one bowl until smooth, then pour into cooled pie crust; refrigerate. Whisk rum, 1 tablespoon water, and gelatin into third bowl and let sit 5 minutes; stir into bowl with plain custard and refrigerate, stirring occasionally, until mixture is wobbly but not set, about 20 minutes.

4. Combine remaining sugar, egg white, remaining water, and cream of tartar in large heatproof bowl set over medium saucepan filled with 1/2 inch of barely simmering water (don't let bowl touch water). With electric mixer on medium-high, beat egg white mixture to soft peaks, about 2 minutes; remove bowl from heat and beat egg white mixture until very thick and glossy and cooled to room temperature, about 3 minutes.

5. Whisk cooled egg white mixture into chilled rum custard until smooth. Pour all but 1/2 cup of rum custard into chocolate custard-filled pie crust. Refrigerate 20 minutes, then top with remaining rum custard. Refrigerate until completely set, 3 hours or up to 24 hours. Top with whipped cream. Serve.

Notes

Why This Recipe Works

Black-bottom pie is a chocolate cream pie with two added bonuses: an airy rum chiffon layer between the chocolate and whipped cream layers and a chocolate cookie crust. We love Black-Bottom Pie's contrast of flavors and texture, but while making the cookie crumb crust, chocolate custard, rum layer, and whipped cream, we dirtied three saucepans, seven bowls, and four whisks and spent three hours in the kitchen. We needed a way to streamline this old-fashioned recipe. To do this, we found that crushed chocolate cookies melted with butter and baked for 10 minutes assured a crisp foundation for our Black-Bottom Pie. We saved time by making one large batch of custard, which we used as a base for both the chocolate and rum layers in our recipe. We added a seven-minute frosting (made by beating egg whites, sugar, water, and cream of tartar over a double boiler) to the rum-enhanced custard to make it sturdy enough to support the whipped cream topping on our Black-Bottom Pie.

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2008 COOK'S COUNTRY in 2007 annual