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Dessert

Chocolate Tartar

A chocolate tart with a batter of egg yolks, sugar, melted chocolate, spices, peels, nuts, flour, and egg whites, topped with jelly and chocolate icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Chocolate Tartar

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 batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Beat the egg yolks well.

  3. Add the sugar and beat again.

  4. Mix in the melted chocolate, allspice, vanilla, and water.

  5. Add the finely chopped orange peel, lemon peel, citron, and nuts.

  6. Sift the flour with baking powder.

  7. Fold the sifted flour into the mixture.

  8. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  9. Divide the batter into two layers.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake until done.

  2. Spread tart jelly between the layers.

Make the icing

  1. Mix chocolate and sugar for the icing.

  2. Slowly add boiling water until smooth.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Allspice + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together727 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Vanilla + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enrich the batter and add richness and colour.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in to lighten the batter and give it structure as it bakes.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the batter as it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven so the batter rises and becomes lighter.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps keep it moist and tender.
Chocolate
Adds deep chocolate flavour and fat that keeps the crumb rich.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Egg whites hold air from beating, and that air gives the batter lift. Vigorous stirring knocks the air out, so the tart bakes up denser and flatter.

Swap the mixed nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, chocolate, allspice, vanilla, orange, lemon):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Mixed nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, chocolate, allspice, vanilla, orange, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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