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Chocolate Tartlets

Chocolate tartlets made with eggs, chocolate, corn starch, milk, sugar, butter, salt, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Chocolate Tartlets

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 Tartlets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the chocolate filling

  1. Dissolve the corn starch in the milk.

  2. Rub the grated chocolate smooth in the milk and heat over low heat.

  3. Add the dissolved corn starch and stir until thickened.

  4. Remove from heat and beat in the egg yolks, sugar, and flavoring.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill small patty pans lined with pastry crust.

  2. Beat the egg whites to a froth, adding a little sugar, and cover the tartlets with it.

  3. Bake until the tops are golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve cold.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks thicken and enrich the filling; whipped whites form the light topping.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk and chocolate mixture into a smooth custard as it heats.
Chocolate
Provides the main flavor and, with the milk, the body of the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilize the whipped egg white topping.
Milk
Liquid that dissolves the starch and forms the custard base.

The step that matters

Stir the filling until thickened. Cornstarch only thickens fully once the mixture is hot enough and stirred through. Stopping early leaves a thin, starchy filling. Removing the pan from heat before adding the yolks keeps them from scrambling.

“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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