French Silk Chocolate Pie

On Sunday, Tavis and Conrad, two of my daughter's friends, came to dinner along with Tavis's parents and his sister and my son and his wife. So we spent most of Sunday unloading and reloading the dishwasher and setting the table. Daughter leafed through the cookbook to find an acceptable dessert recipe and selected this one from Oklahoma.
One should banish any idea of the pioneer families eating this pie. There's no making it without an electric mixer. It would be impossible. More think of oilmen's wives of the 60s serving it at their Oklanhoma City dinner parties. Daughter is allergic to gluten, so I had to return to Whole Foods to buy a gluten free pie crust. I've got to hand it to Whole Foods. They have gluten free everything. Pasta, cookies, pizza, you name it. What they don't have is Baker's Chocolate. Grrr. I scoured the baking aisle, looking for the stuff or its whole foodish approximation. No. I finally asked a worker, who sent me to "Specialty."
"Specialty" is a huge counter right where you come into the store where they have fancy cheeses, the kind wrapped in straw or served in little crocks. They also have chocolate. The young man directed me to a display of chocolate cut into large chunks. I said I would really like it in a box, since I didn't have a scale to measure it with. He sent me to a display of high end, ethically sourced, movie star produced candy bars. So I bought two dark chocolate candy bars and went home muttering imprecations about a store that is so fancy it does not sell anything normal.
My husband warned me when I got home that dark chocolate does not mean unsweetened chocolate. So I used the three ounces of Baker's Semi sweetened Chocolate that we had in the cupboard, and about a third of a dark chocolate bar and cut the sugar in half. It worked fine. If you let the butter soften on the top of the stove, it creams better with the sugar.
This pie is somewhat time consuming as it requires the cook to beat each egg into the melted chocolate for five minutes. That's a grand total of 20 minutes spent moving an electric mixer around a bowl. It was worth it, though. You will note that the eggs are not cooked. I don't know what to say. We ate the pie 24 hours ago, and no one is complaining. You will have to make up your own mind about the wisdom of eating raw eggs.
The end product is really delicious. I spent the whole 20 minutes of beating moving my finger around the edge of the bowl to catch and eat splatters. That was all the pie I got because it served 8 and we were 10 at dinner, so my husband and I nobly refused. Everyone seemed to like it.

French Silk Chocolate Pie

1 cup butter
1 1/2 cup sugar
4 ounces (four squares) unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled
2 teaspoons vanilla
4 eggs
1 baked nine-inch pie shell, cooled
whipped cream

1. Beat the butter with the sugar until very well blended. Mixture should be smooth, fluffy and pale yellow.
2. Blend in the chocolate and vanilla.
3. Using an electric mixer at medium speed, beat in the eggs, one at a time, taking five minutes to incorporate each.
4. Turn the mixture into the pie shell and chill several hours. Decorate with whipped cream before serving.
Makes eight servings.