Mary Coogan’s Chocolate Soufflé

Early on in Elena Ferrante’s most recent novel, The Lying Life of Adults, the narrator writes about files of family photographs carefully sorted and labeled by her mother. I read this and felt a sad pang of envy—I kept so few pictures from childhood, though we were as well documented as any other family during the Kodak years. After my parents’ death, in my haste to be done with the packing up of their house and goods, I left an enormous box of photos behind. And yet the subjects of those pictures are still firmly etched in memory: Dede Coogan and me pushing our doll-baby carriages, a group of little friends at a dress-up party (wearing my mother’s sheer curtains as bridal garb), feeding the fawns at a petting zoo, opening presents under the Christmas tree. And on and on. I thought at the time, Who on earth is going to care about these? I have no children and live alone; my brother was completely indifferent to family history. But now I sorely regret not hanging on to at least a few shots, and so I offer my apologies if certain segments of this memoir are not as visually rich as others—I’ll do my best with words to give a sense of how sweet it often was.

Dede Coogan and I were friends for much of grade school, spending long hours in her third-floor bedroom with the cozy slanted ceiling and biking to classes together while I still lived across the street. We nurtured a private language called “ob talk,” which is easy enough to figure out once you get the hang of it: just put “ob” after every consonant, as in “Coban yobou gobive mobe sobome mobonobey?” (“Can you give me some money”?). Kids picked it up easily, but our chatter drove the adults around us batso, and of course that was part of the point.

We got up to all kinds of other mischief as well, cutting her little brother’s hair with pinking shears, charging her parents’ guests a quarter to get their coats back after cocktail parties, and skinny dipping in the brook that ran past both our houses.

I was a little in awe of Dede, even though she was a year younger, because she seemed to have incredible aplomb. It may seem strange to talk of a third- or fourth-grader possessing style, but somehow when Dede pinned two barrettes in her dirty blonde curls she edged toward a certain pre-pubescent movie-star glamour, a baby Bacall in saddle shoes.

The whole family, in fact, seemed a cut above the usual postwar suburbanites in my parents’ social circle. My mother claimed that the Coogans descended from an old Irish family whose patriarch developed a neighborhood—Coogan’s Bluff—overlooking the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. She told me the story of Harriet Coogan, who married into the family, and when she and her husband bought a house in Newport, RI, they hoped to be accepted by the Vanderbilts and Astors, but because she was Catholic and Irish, hobnobbing with the swells of her day was out of the question. She threw a party in her new mansion, prepared a lavish banquet, dressed to the nines, and no one showed up. There was a movie about Harriet Coogan, said my mom, and I have some dim memory of seeing a story about a beautiful woman shunned by snooty society, but I can’t for the life of me track it down. The Coogans’ scorned banquet may also have been the source for a similar scene in the recent HBO series about old New York, The Gilded Age.

If this was a lesson in the dangers of hanging out with Irish Catholics, it was lost on me. One of the things I most loved to do with Dede, at least for a year or so, was attend mass on Sundays. Our usual house of worship was a community church that adhered to no particular Protestant sect, but the Coogans were Catholic and that set them apart from many of my parents’ friends. (My parents had no problems with my checking out Roman rituals because in general they felt religion was bunkum and believed their children would eventually concur.)

Dede at her wedding the in 1980s

I borrowed one of the Dede’s lacy mass head-scarves and brought a string of my mom’s beads for a fake rosary. Everything in the Catholic church was thrilling and mysterious. The mass was still in Latin in those days, and the priest, in his long embroidered vestments, swung a censer as he walked down the aisle. We were endlessly kneeling and standing and slipping the beads between our fingers, Dede reciting some ritual response, me whispering in ob talk. After a while, though, the magic wore off—I felt like a real fake accepting communion—and I realized I preferred to be with my own family on Sundays.

Holidays were a very big deal at the Coogs, where we celebrated Easter and Thanksgiving. Why my family didn’t reciprocate is a little fuzzy to me. Perhaps the Coogans simply had more family and, for a time, a bigger house. For sure the entertainment was better, with touch football on the lawn, home movies, Easter parades (we wore beribboned bonnets made from paper plates), and Dave singing at the piano. Both our mothers were Marys and so inevitably he crooned, “For it was Ma-ree, Ma-ree, plain as any name can be….”

The food, though, was terrible. I think I knew this even as a kid. That canned ham with pineapple was gelatinous and icky, as were sweet potatoes with mini-marshmallows, and it seemed to me that asparagus was not supposed to fall apart in shreds, bending its tired head when you picked up a stalk between your fingers. But Mary Coogan did have two recipes that could redeem any meal. Aromatic sage jelly, which slathered on dry turkey disguised the cardboard taste, and a divine chocolate soufflé, served in a long Pyrex dish and oozing with dark rapture. I believe she freely handed out the jelly recipe, which I lost long ago, but the soufflé was a closely guarded family secret, which I have had to reconstruct from various sources so yobou coban mobake itob toboo.

Giant Chocolate Soufflé (adapted from Tasty.com)

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened, for greasing

¾ cup granulated sugar, divided

2 ½ cups whole milk

12 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped; or 12 oz semisweet chocolate bits

6 large eggs, separated

¼ cup all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon cream of tartar

powdered sugar, for topping

special equipment: a 1.5-quart soufflé dish (see note)

·         Preheat oven to 400F and position a rack at the bottom of the oven, removing the other rack

·         Grease the souffle dish with softened butter and pour in ¼ cup of sugar. Tilt the ramekin to coat with sugar evenly, then pour out the excess and set the dish aside.

·         In a medium saucepan, scald the milk over medium heat. Just before boiling, remove the milk from the heat and whisk in the chocolate until melted. Set aside.

·         In a large bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, ¼ cup of sugar, the flour, salt, and vanilla, until smooth.

·         Add ½ cup of the chocolate milk mixture to the yolks and whisk until combined. This will temper the egg yolks so they don’t curdle when added to the rest of the chocolate mixture.

·         Return the pan with the remaining chocolate milk mixture back to the stove over medium heat and pour in the chocolate egg yolk mixture. Whisk constantly until thick.

·         Remove the chocolate pastry cream from the heat and transfer to a large bowl. Cover with plastic wrap, making sure the plastic touches the surface to prevent a skin from forming. Chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

·         In a large bowl, combine the egg whites and cream of tartar. With an electric hand mixer, whip the egg whites until they turn opaque and leave trails. Gradually add the remaining ¼ cup (50 g) of sugar and beat until stiff peaks form.

·         Spoon about 1 cup of the whites into the chocolate pastry cream. Fold until no white streaks remain. Gently fold in the rest of the whites in two additions, being careful not to deflate the whites. Once no white streaks are visible, transfer the batter to the prepared souffle dish and smoothe out the top.

·         Run your thumb between the outside edge of the dish and the batter to create a border.

·         Reduce the oven temperature to 375°F, then immediately place the soufflé in the oven and bake for 45-50 minutes, until the soufflé has risen over the edge of the dish. Do not open the oven while baking.

·         Dust the soufflé with powdered sugar and top.

·         Serve with whipped or ice cream

Note: I have made this recipe in both a large-size soufflé dish and smaller ceramic ramekins. If the latter, fill the dishes almost to the rim and hake on a baking sheet at 400F for 15 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through. You can pop these in the oven just as you’re finishing dinner. Take a peek inside one to check if it’s done. If not, pop it back in the oven for a couple more minutes.

And understand that it is in the nature of soufflés to fall; if yours loses some of its oomph before it gets to the table, don’t despair. It will still taste awesome.