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Dessert

Chocolate Custard

A custard made with chocolate, milk, eggs, and sugar, baked until lightly browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Chocolate Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Prepare a soft custard by heating the milk and mixing in the yolks of five eggs.

  2. Dissolve the chocolate in ½ cup of warm milk and heat it to boiling point.

  3. Sweeten the chocolate mixture with brown sugar. Add vanilla extract.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the chocolate mixture into a dish.

  2. Cover with the beaten egg white mixed with a little sugar. Brown the top slightly in the oven.

  3. 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.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set when gently heated.
Egg white
Beaten and sweetened, it forms a light topping that browns in the oven.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Baker's chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and, once dissolved, the dark colour of the custard.
White sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps balance the bitterness of the chocolate.

The step that matters

Heating the egg yolk custard. Egg yolks thicken only up to a point. If the custard is heated too fast or too hot, the proteins curdle and the texture turns grainy. Gentle, steady heat keeps it smooth and lets it thicken evenly.

“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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