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Dessert

Chocolate Pie

A chocolate filling baked in a pie crust, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine grated chocolate and boiling water.

  2. Stir in flour or cornstarch and sugar, and cook until thickened like custard.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill pie crusts with the chocolate mixture.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  3. Top with meringue and bake until golden.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Chocolate + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,994 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and body of the filling.
Flour or cornstarch
Thickens the filling as it cooks, giving it a custard-like set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the bitterness of the chocolate.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling until thickened. Starch thickens only when heated with liquid to a sufficient temperature. Stopping early leaves a runny filling, while overcooking can cause scorching or a stiff, gluey texture as starch overworks.

“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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