When Paul and I traveled home to see my mother it didn’t matter if we were to be there overnight or a week. Sitting on her kitchen counter we would always find three chocolate cream pies. “If these are not gone by the time you leave,” she would threaten “I’m never making you another one.” Not to worry. All of us, but especially Paul, loved Hazel’s chocolate pie.

My mother was an extraordinary cook and she made the best cream pie in the world. As a child my favorite was Banana Cream and I always requested it for my birthday. I remember she made a peanut butter pie that was so good and so rich that I made myself sick on it one time and could never stand the thought of it again. But as I grew up, I too preferred the chocolate. For some reason that I cannot fathom I never got her recipe. I learned to make a pretty good pie from the Better Homes and Garden cookbook with the plaid cover, but it never matched Hazel’s.

When we were home for my sister Lila’s memorial service a few weeks ago, the conversation
turned, as it inevitably does, to food and our memories of it. My niece Shirely happened to mention that she had her grandmother Fletcher’s recipe for chocolate pie. Seriously??!! How had I not known this? And so she sent the recipe and I vowed to try it and see if it was as perfect as I remembered it or as it had grown in my memory to mythical proportions of goodness.

Today is as close to a snow day as we have come here in Maryland for a couple of years. Not much snow is expected, but the ground is so cold that whatever falls will stick to the roads and make driving hazardous and so they are closing schools early and people are settling in to pretend that we are snowed in. When the kids were little, snow days consisted of cooking and baking and movies and hanging out in front of the fireplace. They were like a holiday. I miss those days. Now there is no one here to eat the the goodies, but I have decided to use it as an excuse to cook something yummy, to watch episode after episode of Downton Abbey, sit by the fire and bake my mother’s chocolate pie.