Top recipe 2008 (so far)

This is Fudge Pie as made by Barb, of Barb and Art Live in Italy. I made this again and took it out of the oven sooner, which gave me a creamier, fudgier center. (Barb, I don’t actually measure either the salt nor the vanilla!)

When I started a blog, I read a lot of opinions about blogging. The first and most important thing said was usually to be original. I decided to be rigorously original. I took that to mean that everything I put on the page had to be my own work, including the recipes. Over time, I started looking around the rest of the blogging world and I realized that most people who blog about food use recipes from cookbooks and report on their experience with that recipe. (I say that left them more time to become good photographers and that’s why many of them are much better than I.)

So then I knew how original ‘original’ needed to be, but by then I had the habit of posting new recipes of my own invention or traditional recipes updated with modern ingredients and a few dishes I’d copied from eating experiences around my world. It’s been a habit I’ve been unable to break, and besides to me cookbooks are more like biographies than instructional manuals.

Sometimes, however, I do cook something I’ve found somewhere else. Sometimes I point you at the source, vis a vis the macaron. Today, I am going to give you a recipe just as I found it, because it is fabulous. It is not someone’s original work, but something from a cookbook, unnamed, that her grandmother used to make.

No competition, this is the best thing I have made in 2008. It’s one of the best things I have eaten this year too. It would be the best thing, if it were nutritionally a little more healthy and a little less addictive.

I ran into the recipe at Group Recipes. Simple, quick, it doesn’t take any exotic ingredients. I cooked it less than 12 hours after reading it the first time. I would point you at it, but you’d have to join to see it.

I made only one real change. I didn’t have 1.5 cups of white sugar, so I used 1 cup of white sugar and .5 cup of brown sugar. I left out the 1 teaspoon of milk, because I couldn’t imagine what 1 teaspoon of milk could possibly do for it that would be worth washing the spoon. Other than the little pan in which I melted the butter and chocolate, and the pie plate in which it was cooked, it took one bowl and one whisk to make and was easy to clean up. In about 10 minutes it was in the oven.

Fudge Pie

Ingredients

* 1/2 cup butter (130 g burro)
* 3 squares unsweetend chocolate (85 g cioccolato amaro)
* 3 large eggs, beaten
* 1 1/2 cups sugar
* 1/4 cup flour
* 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
* 1/2 tsp salt
* 1tsp. milk

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees
2. Melt butter and chocolate and cool slightly
3. Gradually mix chocolate and eggs
4. Add rest of ingredients and stir until just mixed
5. Spread into a buttered 9 inch pie plate
6. Bake 40 minutes
7. The center will be soft, but it will firm as it cools
8. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream

I’ve carried it all over the neighborhood, giving tastes and samples. I didn’t serve it with ice cream because I didn’t have any and besides it seems really rich all by itself. You can’t eat very much before you say enough. The first bite was just otherworldly.

Tomorrow I will give you a picture.