My past love affair with meals was all about chocolate—in each kind I may get my fingers on. As a toddler, I often didn’t stray removed from the fundamentals: my household and I might make Nestlé Toll Home cookies or Ghirardelli Chocolate brownies, sugary candy and reliably scrumptious treats designed to feed a crowd. Nevertheless, at the very least yearly, I might hunt down a large slab of bittersweet chocolate and pull my favourite cookbook off the shelf, a slim quantity wrapped in brown paper with a two-word title: “Chocolate Decadence.”
This one was in contrast to my household’s different cookbooks—no shiny cowl, no styled pictures—and its spindly textual content provided a single recipe, one which the guide’s introduction urged had been “guarded, pilfered, imitated, disputed, mutilated, restored, and herewith set down definitively for the ages.” The guide’s illustrations have been a serious a part of its illicit attract, every web page that includes a unadorned lady with downturned eyes, flowing hair, and full thighs. But as voyeuristic because the guide felt (it was the closest factor to porn I’d seen on the time), it wasn’t crude or obscene. It was sensual and uncooked and unabashedly erotic, in each textual content and pictures: a lady at peace within the kitchen, cradling a bowl of melted chocolate in her unclothed lap, whipping cream to a frenzy, and draping chocolate curls over her fingertips—all, it appeared, for her enjoyment alone. As I traced every of the recipe’s 11 easy steps, it felt like an incantation, and to my teenage self, a promise of pleasures that maturity may maintain.
For Janice Feuer Haugen, the creator of the cake, pleasure was the purpose. Like me, Feuer Haugen grew up in California within the San Fernando Valley; she loved cooking, regardless that in her household dwelling within the Nineteen Fifties, “nothing was from scratch.” Solely when she transferred to the College of California, Berkeley, in 1967, on the peak of the counterculture motion, did she begin cooking for herself in earnest, whereas additionally attending “encounter teams,” a preferred motion on the time supposed to facilitate emotional exchanges and sensory consciousness.
Private openness led to culinary exploration throughout Feuer Haugen’s post-grad adventures at a three-month Le Cordon Bleu course in London. When she returned to California, Feuer Haugen interviewed to work on the Heritage Home Resort in Mendocino, characterised by The New York Instances in 1970 because the place the place “squares and longhairs” blended. She grew to become mates with the chef, Martin Waller, who confirmed her a recipe for a chocolate truffle cake, which he had obtained from a loyal buyer. “I’d solely made the unique as soon as earlier than and it got here out horrible,” Feuer Haugen acknowledges, “however as soon as I realized make a genoise—whipping the eggs and sugar collectively over warmth—it grew to become one thing actually particular.”
As a pastry chef, she first served her model of the cake at a particular dinner at Berkeley restaurant Narsai’s to honor chef Joyce Goldstein, the place the host requested her to arrange one thing “very chocolate and really decadent.” Feuer Haugen knew it was a knockout when her boss on the time, restaurateur Narsai David, got here working to her the subsequent morning, asking “What was in that cake!?” Garnished with chocolate curls and hidden beneath a mountain of whipped cream, the cake was christened by Feuer Haugen as “Chocolate Decadence,” and per David’s suggestion, served in a pool of raspberry purée; it rapidly grew to become a mainstay on the dessert menu at Narsai’s.
Even with the cake’s reputation, Feuer Haugen was conscious that David was trying to take credit score for the dish—and the title—whereas it was on his menu. She determined it was time to inform the story behind the cake and declare the recipe for herself. She collaborated with Veronica di Rosa, an artist based mostly within the Napa Valley whom she’d met throughout a retreat in Canada. Impressed, di Rosa confirmed her an artwork guide that belonged to her husband, the vintner and artwork collector Rene di Rosa, through which the mom of photographer Les Krims made rooster soup, kreplach, and matzo balls—all whereas topless. Impressed by the guide, what emerged in “Chocolate Decadence”—within the textual content, drawings, and in Rebecca Martinez’s design—was a culinary ode to feminine self satisfaction, and to the pleasures of baking by hand. “As a pastry chef, your fingers are so delicate,” Feuer Haugen says. “Your entire physique is a part of the method.”
When the guide was launched by an unbiased Berkeley-based press in 1976, with an preliminary print run of just some hundred copies, it rapidly discovered its manner into numerous households, together with that of Julia Youngster, who wrote to Feuer Haugen in 1977, saying that her husband Paul “notably loved [the drawings], and savored each little bit of it, whereas I savored each web page of the recipe.”
As we speak, Feuer Haugen has stepped away from desserts—and from California. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, educating yoga and spreading her love of meals by volunteering for her favourite native farm on the summer season farmers market. However she nonetheless sees the pleasure of the cake as important to its success. “We’ve misplaced the enjoyment and achievement and pleasure of the kitchen,” Feuer Haugen tells me, “and we may get it again if we simply change our perspective. Cooking isn’t essentially a pleasure for many individuals, but when we will discover [pleasure] in meals, it’s an incredible reward, and one we may give ourselves.”
Easy but sensuous, the guide is a snapshot of the time, however studying it as a young person—and nonetheless immediately—it appears like a radical reframing of delight. Most desserts demand a crowd, and recipes for probably the most seductive of desserts depend on the anticipation of consumption. But this recipe calls for you benefit from the making of it. Every web page tells you ways to concentrate, to beat eggs and sugar to their “potential treble quantity,” to heat chocolate so it turns into “delightfully inclined for curling,” and to fold flour into chocolate together with your naked fingers with “the utmost tenderness.”
In some ways, it’s the rarest of presents: a recipe designed to feed the chef’s senses, one that actually delivers on the quiet luxurious of creating one thing scrumptious for no purpose aside from your individual enjoyment. So this Valentine’s Day, slightly than baking to share or seduce, I’m sharing this recipe for anybody who needs it—however particularly these alone within the kitchen, who want no excuse to make themselves one thing really decadent.
Many due to Jock McDonald, son of Veronica di Rosa, for granting permission to share pictures from “Chocolate Decadence.”
