Chocolate Roulade
My mom was not much of a baker. At our house, all cookies were chocolate chip (from the recipe on the bag of chips) or spritz cookies at holidaytime. Her cakes were from boxed mixes. (She still calls them “stupid cakes” because “any stupid fool can make one.”) That was pretty much her dessert repertoire. Mom did have one dessert that always wowed the crowd, Roulage Léontine, from Dione Lucas’s 1964 classic, The Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook. While I’ve updated the recipe and called it Chocolate Roulade, in my heart this is still the 1960’s-era dessert that my mom made when she really wanted to impress her dinner guests.
The cookbook is organized as a set of menus. The roulage or roulade ( a more modern term) is part of Menu 27, which starts with an Omelette aux Fines Herbes, moves onto Poulet Majorca and Pommes de Terres Sauteé, and finishes with the roulage/roulade. The recommended wine for the meal was Portugese Lancers. Quite a throwback to be sure.
Paging through the book, I’m transported back to the days of Julia Child and the American fascination with classical Continental cuisine. In the intervening decades, Julia became an icon and Dione faded from our collective culinary consciousness.
