What is more satisfying, or more nostalgic, than a chocolate pudding cup?

When I was starting out in pastry, in the way-back of the early 2000s, I was dedicated to appealing to diners my own age. We were all learning how to be adults in the world, and part of this included dining in restaurants as bigger versions of our smaller, former selves. I wanted to find a way to bring those diners back to a very specific feeling of sitting on the wall-to-wall shag carpet, legs tucked under their little bodies, inches from a giant panel television, spoon stuck into something that made them feel their earliest waves of deep comfort. A little sentimentality never hurt anyone. In fact, it is pretty good fuel in a kitchen.

Recipe: Chocolate Pudding Cups

I’m pretty sure many chefs of my generation started cooking for similar reasons. We grew up in an era when food was transitioning from daily chore to convenience and even pleasure — a time when it was becoming more acceptable for mothers to not cook every last thing, when wayward latchkey kids like me could have a sweet treat just waiting for us in the refrigerator, as if it was no big deal. Chocolate pudding, cheap and simple, neither laborious nor meant for any kind of special occasion, was a fixture, ready to be enjoyed alone with our books, our albums, our radios and our televisions.

So I set out to find a perfect pudding recipe many years later, and I became enamored, as pastry chefs are wont to do, with French form. Pots de crème caught my eye, and later I flirted with the Italian budino, which, if I’m being honest, this recipe more closely identifies with.

‘Is it the pudding cup of our childhood? Not quite, no. But it started there.’