Family Table Recipe: Bittersweet Chocolate Banana Cream Pie

Every family has a collective pool of memories; the time that one of the kids’ pants fell down while crossing the street, or the birthday party that got rained out and mama and papa earned serious points by moving the kiddie pool into the dining room. Most of my family’s memories are good and they make us laugh. I hope yours are, too. But with the sweet memories come some bitter ones, ones that are harder to remember because we don’t always want to. But I believe it does our families a great injustice to celebrate only the sweet times. A diet of honey and sugar with no kale or brussels sprouts does not a healthy body make.

As it happens, today is an anniversary of a bitter memory in my own family. Three years ago on this day, I was admitted to a hospital because of pregnancy-related complications, and I stayed there for three months. It wasn’t the happiest time of my life, but I remember it every year. And this year, I’m inviting my family to remember with me. I’m not sure yet what that will look like, but tonight we will gather around the table and remember that bitter time together. And we will celebrate the sweetness that the Peanut is there with us, because for many months we weren’t sure she would be.

We have other bitter memories that we share together; the loss of grandparents and great-grandparents; the loss of a daughter and sister who we never knew; the diagnosis of chronic illness; and we have different rituals surrounding how we remember each one. We have made tribute posters, watched home movies, read poems, looked at photographs, and lit candles. And we’ve discovered that there is always a nugget of sweetness waiting to be found beneath the bitterness. This is not a glass-half-full-optimism, nor a Pollyanna philosophy. It is simply a universal fact of life that you can’t separate the bitter and sweet. They are there to be experienced together.

I wanted to make a dessert that would celebrate this fact. I knew I wanted pudding, because pudding is such a comforting food. And I knew I wanted chocolate, for the same reason. I wanted it to feel special, but not happy-clappy special. And of course I wanted to be able to eat it, which meant it needed to be dairy/gluten/soy/refined sugar-free. So I experimented with a few favorite recipes until I had this Bittersweet Chocolate Banana Cream Pie. You could serve the pudding in cups without making the pie, but the crust and cream are so easy and elevate it to a truly special dessert. My family loved it. I hope yours does, too.