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Dessert

Chocolate Pie

Chocolate pie with a cake base and powdered-sugar frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. 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 chocolate filling

  1. Melt the chocolate.

  2. Mix the melted chocolate with powdered sugar and egg yolks.

  3. Pour the mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Cook until thickened.

Make the cake batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Add eggs and milk.

  3. Gradually mix in flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda until smooth.

  4. Pour the batter into a pie crust.

Bake and frost

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  2. Beat the egg whites.

  3. Gradually add powdered sugar until thick.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Chocolate + creamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sweet chocolate
Provides the main flavor and rich body of the filling.
Egg yolks
Thicken the chocolate filling as they set with heat.
Flour
Gives the cake batter structure as it sets during baking.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the cake batter.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes the egg whites and helps the batter rise with baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with acid in the batter to produce gas for rising.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture into the boiling milk. Adding the chocolate mixture gradually to hot milk helps prevent the egg yolks from scrambling. Cooking until thickened lets the yolks set the custard smoothly.

“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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