Something French and Chocolatey

August 13th, 2011

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Anyone who loves to cook has benchmark recipes. There are always a few dishes that live in our personal histories as particular first discoveries of taste. Or recipes that introduced us to the forces of art and science, sensuality and service, history and culture that make us want to go back into the kitchen again and again. For me, one of those recipes is chocolate mousse.

I had already dabbled in cooking and already had a collection of food memories—a particular green pea in my grandfather’s garden; discovering that something called cumin was responsible for making me want to scream with joy when eating tacos at Meghan’s; lobster in drawn butter at a Las Vegas hotel when I was 7 that will forever make me the kind of person who orders room service—but it wasn’t until Chocolate Mousse that I realized I was in it for the long haul. Now as I write, I’m wondering if this is a classic chicken-egg situation. Do I love chocolate mousse because it made me a cook? Or do I love to cook because so much is wrapped up in the chocolate mousse?

Chocolate mousse isn’t just a cloud of chocolate fluff that was found on too many mediocre menus in the 1970’s. No. For me, chocolate mousse has the meltingly sweet taste of belonging. I got the recipe from my dad.

You may have read this post about how I came to live with my dad in my teenage years, but before I proceed, some background: He’s always had a thing for France. He’s not Francophile per se, but in his personal history, a bunch of forces (rate exchanges, work benefits, European family, etc…) collided during his youth to make it more possible for him to go to summer camp in France rather than Canada, where he lived. There is a piece of his make-up that will always be the boy who delved into French culture and language to schmooze the belles filles.

Another thing about my dad is that he loves chocolate. Let me rephrase that: He used to get out of bed in the middle of the night to eat chocolate, and if there was none left, it was not unheard of for him to get dressed and go to the store and buy some.

As you can imagine, my dad ran a household that fostered the making of chocolate mousse.

I’m not sure how it all started, but at some point in trying to get to know each other, he dragged out some cookbooks. It isn’t easy for teenagers and fathers to find common ground, but I came to live with him dressed in lots of black vintage dresses and having a particular interest in Truffaut films. Maybe those traits prompted him to see something French and chocolatey in me, too.

We had no idea what we were doing (my dad is an accomplished cook, but as bachelor supreme, whipping egg whites wasn’t really his thing). The chocolate mousse turned out a tad runny that first time, and maybe even a little curdled. We, however, still reveled in the lathery, bittersweet cups of custard that we had collectively created. It was fun and as I licked the last bite from my spoon, I admitted that I wanted to make it again.

Without another word about it, my father always made sure the fridge was stocked with the ingredients for chocolate mousse. To some, this may seem like another fold in the fabric of family grocery life, but we’re talking about my dad here. The only other things in the fridge were restaurant leftovers and lone wedges of stinky Camembert. Suddenly, we were stocked with eggs and vanilla. And there was always the best quality chocolate, of course.

I must have made chocolate mousse dozens of times that year. I slowly learned, by feel, how to melt the chocolate slowly enough. I read and reread the recipe to look for hints about when to stop whipping the eggwhites, how to fold one ingredient into another. But the most important thing that happened through all of this is that I realized I could contribute something, if not meaningful, then appreciated in my tiny family. My dad ate a lot of chocolate mousse for a while.

While visiting my dad last week, I started to wonder about that old recipe. I had kind of taken it for granted and I suddenly longed to see it again. I climbed through my dad’s pile of old cookbooks, pulling out every one that looked likely. I vaguely remembered getting it out of something labeled French-something-or-other, but I would know it when I saw it, to be sure. My dad opened a tattered book and handed it to me. The Book of French Cooking by Dione Lucas (one of Julia Child’s inspirations, it turns out). The page was well-worn and stained. He smiled. And then like the miracle of finding an old friend, there it was right in front of me. Chocolate mousse.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 13th, 2011 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.