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Dessert

Chocolate Custard

A chocolate custard made by dissolving chocolate in water, adding milk and egg yolks, boiling, sweetening, and thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Custard

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dissolve the chocolate in water.

  2. Add milk and egg yolks to the chocolate mixture.

  3. Boil for a few minutes.

  4. Sweeten with sugar.

  5. Pour the hot mixture over the beaten egg yolks.

  6. Return to the kettle and stir until thickened.

  7. Remove from heat just before boiling and let cool.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set when gently heated, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Chocolate
Provides the main flavour and colour of the custard.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the chocolate and thickens with the yolks.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the bitterness of the chocolate.

The step that matters

Return to the kettle and stir until thickened. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but if the custard gets too hot they can scramble into curds. Stir constantly and remove from heat just before boiling to keep it smooth.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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