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Dessert

Chocolate Cream Pie

A chocolate custard pie made with milk, chocolate, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and coffee are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,497 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells buttery, creamy. The science ↓

Chocolate Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until scalding.

  2. Add the chocolate to the hot milk and stir until melted.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar.

  4. Combine the milk mixture with the egg yolk mixture.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites and add vanilla extract.

Assemble

  1. Pour the filling into the pre-baked puff pastry shell.

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 + coffeetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  5. Coffee + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,391 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard filling and carries the melted chocolate.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set with heat.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they lighten the filling and add airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilise the beaten yolks.
Baker's chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and deep colour of the filling.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently preserves the air whipped into the egg whites. Stirring vigorously deflates the foam, leaving a dense rather than light filling.

“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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