POT AU CHOCOLAT
Photo from American Heritage Chocolate on unsplash.com
Madeleine St. John’s Pot au Chocolat
I believe that my Belgian-born, French-speaking mother called this preparation a “mousse” because that is what Americans would call it in the 1960s when she began to make it. But a mousse has air whipped into it; this is what French cooking calls a “pot” (pronounced like Edgar Allen’s last name, “Poe”), a dense, egg- and cream-enriched dessert.
My siblings and I tend to eliminate her call for “1-2 tablespoons orange-flavored liqueur or dark rum,” feeling, as my brother Marc puts it, that it “just gets in the way of the intense chocolate flavor.” We also forgo any nuts. We are half-Belgian; we like our chocolate straight.
Ingredients
6-ounce package of chocolate drops, bits, or chips
3/4 cup milk, scalded
2 eggs
3 tablespoons hot espresso or strong coffee (OK to use decaffeinated)
2/3 cup chopped walnuts, optional
Directions
In a blender, combine the ingredients at high speed for 1 and 1/2 minutes. (Add the optional walnuts.) Blend the mixture for 30 seconds more. Pour the mousse into 6 ramekins and chill for 3 hours, or until it is set. May be served with a dollop of whipped cream. (Bill St. John note: Do not make this dessert if you eschew raw eggs.)
Wine Pairings and Why: Odd as it seems, sweet foods are the most difficult to pair with wine. Sweetness, as one or more sugars such as fructose or sucrose, combines with the majority of wines (themselves dry) to cause sensations on the tongue of bitterness, astringency and acidity. Drink a dry white Burgundy with vanilla ice cream and discover a terrible experience. But if you pair the level of sugar in the food with a corresponding (or slightly higher) level of sweetness in the wine, that works. A good example is pairing an apple tart with a medium-sweet muscat. But the overall guideline is that sweetness in food requires the same level of sweetness in wine. With some moderately sweet desserts, that wine would be a Moscato from Italy or this country or a Piedmontese Brachetto d’Acqui. With very sweet desserts, a Port, or a Bordeaux Sauternes, or even a Bual or Malmsey Madeira from Portugal.