Chocolate sundae pie is not a chocolate pie. It’s a vanilla cream custard, with a good dose of grated nutmeg, boiled to exactly the right thickness and folded into stiff-beaten egg whites, poured into a plain, baked shell, and topped with a mountain of whipped cream, which is topped with a dusting of shaved chocolate. This recipe came from my great-grandmother Florence Huntting Edwards, who grew up in the white house opposite the Presbyterian Church here on Main Street and married “down” into the Edwards family of roughneck whalers from Amagansett and named her best pie a “sundae” pie because it was sort of like an ice cream sundae in its construction: vanilla, whipped cream, chocolate. I’ve been forced to explain the name-versus-contents dissonance over and over and over since I was 11 or 12 years old and first began attempting to make it.
I actually don’t recommend that you try it.
Chocolate sundae pie is a highly rigorous test of culinary skills and for every 10 times I’ve produced one, I’ve succeeded perhaps twice. So, over the course of, say, 46 Thanksgivings since I was a childhood holiday chef in a molasses-smeared apron and, say, another 20 Christmases — the only occasions on which I make this pie, usually once but sometimes twice a year — I’ve done it really right, let’s say, maybe a dozen times.
The vanilla custard filling is supposed to have a mousse texture, with air bubbles; it’s not just a smooth pudding. My late Aunt Mary was the Simon Cowell of the seated panel of chocolate sundae pie judges, and she didn’t hesitate to let me know when I’d done it wrong. More often than not, it came out unset, and couldn’t be cut into a slice, or was a bit too rubbery. Every few years I’d hit the mark with the correct mouth feel (I actually hate that pretentious term “mouth feel” — please! — but here it’s correct) of foamy delight. Aunt Mary remembered her grandmother’s version and said my pie was right only twice, I think, on only two Thanksgivings, as I grew up from a slender freckle-faced baker in Anne of Green Gables braids into a plump matron shouting unheeded instructions over my shoulder at my own teenagers and the recipe and the kitchen equipment stayed immutably and mysteriously the same. To make sundae pie, I call on the services of a very humble and dented double boiler inherited from my grandmother Jeannette, the second in the line of four generations of chocolate sundae pie chefs.
Florence Hutting Edwards, this same Aunt Mary told me once — speaking cautiously, as if afraid to reveal too frankly a family scandal (even though the scandal she seemed to be alluding to so cryptically occurred in the 1890s) — was a wonderful baker but also a naughty girl, known for twinkled-eyed mischief and possibly flinging off her knickers to enjoy misadventures with young men who came to town for the summer season. Aunt Mary seemed to hint that Florence may even have married my great-grandfather, Capt. Everett Edwards — the very upright Amagansett shore whaler who appeared in Vogue magazine in February 1937, alongside Gary Cooper and Prince George, as one of the handsomest men alive and, no, I didn’t make that up — because she found herself “in trouble,” if you know what I mean.
I’m not sure if I understood the hinting-around correctly, and there’s no one left alive to ask!
The challenge and complication with this inherited favorite pie is that, after you have mixed the ingredients together using what Florence called “a Dover beater” — which is to say, a hand-crank egg beater, the height of modernity 100 or 110 years ago, and I still use one of those, too — you have to gently cook the custard in that double boiler to just the right consistency and temperature, and the recipe doesn’t offer insight into what that temperature is. You have to eyeball it, trying to guess what Florence meant by “a thick cream.” A “thick cream” is much thicker than you’d think.
The recipe, which has come down to us via the “Cook Book” edition of 1948 from the Ladies Village Improvement Society (the edition published in the town’s 300th-anniversary year, with a blue cover featuring a wishful-thinking illustration of a Native man with a single feather in his hair happily shaking hands with a colonist wearing one of those unbecoming tall Pilgrim hats) also says to “add gelatin” to the custard when it comes off the stove, but it doesn’t indicate how much gelatin or if the gelatin needs to be whisked into water first. My technique is one packet of gelatin, mixed with two tablespoons of water before being whisked in and left to cool outdoors on the back step by the kitchen door. That works, more or less. Some of the time.
My father died shortly after I turned 13 and this was his family’s recipe, and I cannot recall how it came to be that I knew sundae pie was required on Thanksgiving. Who was making the sundae pie before I began to? My dad was a wonderful and creative cook, who embraced the concept of locavore eating decades before anyone ever heard the term (and inventing dishes like oysters with sorrel instead or the rich but insipid spinach Rockefeller), but he wasn’t, at least in my memory, a dessert-baker. Someone must have done the pie on Thanksgiving, in order for it to remain in the line of kitchen succession. It’s within the realm of the possible — if not, indeed, likely, now that I am turning my thoughts to this — that my dad set me to the task and handed me the 1948 cookbook, knowing he had a bad cancer and wasn’t long for this world and wanting as much inherited lore as possible to travel onward to another generation. (He certainly took pains to make sure a lot of local history didn’t go to the grave with him, rushing to write his excellent book “The South Fork.”)
And as I write this, I am only just now realizing that this chocolate sundae pie is, in fact, just a chiffon pie! I’ve been making this sucker for about 46 years and it never occurred to me that it is a classic vanilla chiffon, scented with the classic New England “treat!” fragrance of nutmeg and topped with whipped cream and a dusting of bittersweet chocolate shavings. Now that’s a nice word, “chiffon.” But I cannot go renaming chocolate sundae pie now, to something more accurately descriptive — like nutmeg chiffon or Florence’s Revenge — because it just wouldn’t be right.